Tears of the Furies m-2

by Christopher Golden

  Medusa had stopped running. He assumed she needed to rest, because he doubted that this was her final destination. Clay clutched the handlebars of the motorcycle and focused on the tendril of ectoplasmic energy that stretched out ahead of him, the soul trail left by the passing of the monster and the spectral remnant of the last human she had slain. He had hunted many killers in his long existence and when he drew near to them he was always aware.

  He could feel the murder in her heart.

  The motorcycle’s roar shattered the predawn quiet, grinding the air even as its tires bit the road. It was as though Sparta itself slumbered and the engine startled it awake.

  They passed a decrepit hotel and a cafe, then came to a crossroads where Clay brought the bike to a halt, engine grumbling, struggling to spring forward once more. Squire continued his recent silence and Clay wondered if the hobgoblin had somehow fallen asleep while straddling the motorcycle.

  "What is it?" whispered the voice of Dr. Graves.

  Clay glanced to his left and saw the ghost hovering there, a golden tint to his spectral form, as though the sunrise tinted not only the eastern sky but the adventurer’s wandering soul.

  "We’re going to have to get off and walk soon. I don’t want the engine to give us away."

  Graves nodded once. "At your discretion."

  Clay revved the engine and turned right. The road took them up into the hills, toward Sparta’s own acropolis. In the bustle of the day, Clay thought there must have been a great deal of traffic on these streets, but at this hour the only vehicles they passed were trucks he assumed were on their way to make early deliveries. Otherwise the city seemed abandoned.

  For long minutes he navigated the motorcycle in pursuit of that ectoplasmic thread, moving farther and farther from the populated center of the city. At the base of the hill upon which was the Spartan acropolis, Clay pulled the motorcycle off the road and into a small gulley that ran along beside the pavement.

  "Thank Christ," Squire grunted as he dismounted the bike with some difficulty. "My balls couldn’t have survived another mile."

  Clay couldn’t help it. He laughed. They had ridden fast and hard, daring disaster on every curve, and he had felt the tension of their hunt. Now they must be more cautious than ever, stealthy yet savage. The moment was not without trepidation. For perhaps the first time since he had known the hobgoblin, Clay found that Squire’s humor was precisely what he needed. All the time Squire had been silent he must have been gritting his teeth in pain.

  "Oh, sure, laugh it up. I don’t see you walking like John Wayne."

  Squire staggered stiffly away, walking off his discomfort.

  Dr. Graves alighted upon the ground several feet away. The ghost seemed barely an echo, almost entirely insubstantial. If Clay looked away, or tried to see the specter in his peripheral vision, he thought he might not be able to see Graves at all.

  "You seem… less, somehow," Clay said. "Why is that?"

  The pinpoint lights in the ghost’s bottomless eyes glowed more brightly and he narrowed his gaze. There was a tightness to his expression that belied the camaraderie that was usually between them.

  "The night is ending. Dawn is near. Spirits are… thinnest then. I could manifest completely, but it takes more effort. I thought I ought to save that effort for Medusa."

  Clay nodded. "I meant no offense."

  Graves waved him off. "I took none. It just saddens me." The ghost rippled in the darkness as though in the breeze and turned to look up the hill. "She’s up there, is she? On the acropolis?"

  "No." Clay pointed to the west. "The soul-tether leads this way, around the base. My guess is our destination is on the other side."

  The ghost drifted for several yards in the direction Clay had pointed and then seemed to realize what he was doing. With obvious purpose, Graves began to walk rather than float.

  "Shall we?" he asked, glancing back.

  Squire had gone the wrong way, but he had not strayed far. The hobgoblin had been watching them and now came strolling back, his gait no longer awkward.

  "Game time, huh?"

  Clay laid the motorcycle down in the gulley, hoping to come back for it. "Yeah. And I don’t know if we’re going to get another shot at this, so — "

  Squire bristled. "You think I’m some amateur?"

  "Not at all." Clay shook his head for emphasis. "Not at all. You’re Hell in a skirmish. But you get carried away sometimes, get loud. You like to talk."

  The hobgoblin took a deep breath and let it out. "Not a sound. We’ll get her. Greece is nice, but I’m through with the scenic tour. We end it here."

  Clay looked at him a moment longer and then the two of them set off after Dr. Graves, the ghost visible only in silhouette against the indigo of the horizon. A glimmer of gold had appeared in the east, now, as though the edge of the night had begun to kindle into flame.

  The corpse of Hades had become its own Hell, a city of damnation within the vaster Underworld. The Furies had tortured souls for an eternity in their lair, and the suffering screamed through the vast hollow caverns of Hades’ chest. The anguish in the very texture of the air was tangible and oppressive, and now it seemed to close in around Ceridwen so that she felt the weight of this darkest of realms fully for the first time.

  A warrior sorceress of Faerie, a Princess of the Fey, she was tainted by this place.

  She had to escape.

  "Come," she said, grabbing Eve’s arm.

  Still nearly feral, the blood of gods staining her fangs and chin, the vampire spun on her, snarling. Then her face softened.

  "Eve, we must go now."

  They had made their way back along the path that had taken them to Hades’ heart and now stood within sight of one of the dead god’s ribs, the massive bones that arced up the sides of the flesh city, columns that supported the dark heavens of this Hell. Even here the upper reaches of the cadaver’s roof were not visible, the sky too dark to see.

  A wind of ancient screams blew past them and out through the gaping wound in side of the suicidal god’s corpse. Eve had slain one of the Erinyes, murdered part of the fabric of the mythology that had sifted down from the earliest age of the world. The myths and legends, the soul debris of that primeval time, had not so much woken as twitched in the midst of its death throes. The ghosts of gods and the lingering specter of a thousand years of worship had felt the slaughter of one of the Kindly Ones, and had lashed back. Like a tornado of retribution, the grandeur of a bygone age had risen against them. It might subside, but Ceridwen did not believe it would do so before they were all dead, before blood had been spilled in exchange for the blood of Tisiphone of the Erinyes.

  Once more she urged Eve toward the way out of Hades’ corpse. It would take ages to return to the surface world — to Conan Doyle’s world of Blight — but Ceridwen did not want to think about how they would manage the journey. She only wanted to be moving.

  "We can’t. We have to wait for Doyle," Eve said, eyes narrowed in anger and doubt.

  Ceridwen bared her own teeth, aware that her ire could be just as terrible as Eve’s if pushed. "Arthur left us to face some task he felt he had to confront alone. If his life were ebbing, I would know. If his heart were breaking, I would know. I feel him, woman, every moment of my life. How can you think I would leave him here? He will follow, and the best we can do to aid him is get ourselves to the exit from this blasted place so that he does not have to concern himself with our escape."

  Eve stared at her, eyes gleaming yellow in the strange darklight of the Furies’ Hell.

  In the midst of Hades’ heart there was a battle raging. Gigantic figures of metal and leather armor, supported only by bones and spirit-wraiths, the mad ghosts of the Greek gods, were battling with an army of swift, brutal soldiers grown from the ivory teeth of the Hydra.

  Danny Ferrick had saved them all, forcing Nigel Gull to sing in the voice of Orpheus. Even now the demon boy was by Gull’s side and he no longer looked so much like a boy
. It pained Ceridwen to see his transformation, but Danny was all demon now. The hatred in his eyes and the way his black-red skin glistened made him monstrous and terrifying, even more so than his horns or claws. He seemed to have grown during their time in the Underworld, his chest broader, his arms thicker and more powerful. It occurred to her that perhaps he had been tainted by this place just as she had been, and she hoped that both of them could somehow be cleansed.

  But Ceridwen had little faith that either of them would ever be the same.

  The changeling was clearly ready to kill Gull if he stopped singing. The voice of Orpheus rang sweetly through the Underworld, cutting through even the ancient cries of the damned. But Gull could not sing forever. The towering, shambling gods had ceased their battle. Even the Hydra’s children had stopped attacking the dead things, the shades of gods.

  Ceridwen gestured for Eve to look at Gull. The sorcerer’s twisted face — as misshapen as his soul — showed the strain of his effort, and his eyes revealed his fear of Danny. Somehow, once controlled by Orpheus’s song, the demon boy had become immune to it, and Gull had not bothered to try it on Eve and Ceridwen.

  The girl, Jezebel, was dead, leaving Gull with only Hawkins as an ally, and the cold man with his colder eyes seemed only to want to survive, now that things had gone so terribly wrong.

  "We’ve got to go," Ceridwen insisted.

  Eve stared a moment longer at Danny, Gull, and Hawkins, and then she nodded.

  "All right. But we don’t go back out through the gates of this place without Arthur."

  Ceridwen moved so swiftly that Eve could not stop her. Her fingers tangled in the vampire’s hair and she gripped it painfully tight, even as she sent tendrils of ice racing down over Eve’s face.

  "We are allies, sometimes friends," Ceridwen said. "But question my loyalty once more and one of us will die."

  Eve slapped her hand away, fangs lengthening again. She hissed softly, held Ceridwen’s gaze, then turned away.

  "Danny! We’re going!" Eve snapped.

  The demon boy looked as though he wanted to argue, but then his gaze shifted from Eve to Ceridwen and back again, and instead he nodded once. He grabbed Nigel Gull and propelled the mage toward the wound in Hades’ side. The skin around that gaping wound was ossified, insects and strange creatures fossilized in the dead god’s flesh.

  Ceridwen led the way, leaping from the dizzying height of the exit toward the black ashen earth below. She drew a wind beneath her as she fell, and landed easily. Before she could even turn, Eve dropped to the ground beside her, striking hard and rolling, kicking up ebony dust on impact.

  Both of them turned to watch Danny climbing down the exterior of the unimaginably huge body, plunging his claws into the dead flesh and scrambling downward as though he was a spider. For a moment Ceridwen was surprised he had left Gull and Hawkins to find their own way down, but then she realized that the mage and his operative needed to flee this place just as quickly as she and her allies did. Emerging through the wound, Gull grabbed Hawkins by the hand, his mouth still open, the voice of Orpheus still flowing sweetly from his throat. Tentacles of blue-black fire wrapped around them, then shot toward the ground like lightning, carrying them down to stand only a few feet from Ceridwen and Eve.

  Hawkins’s expression had changed. He pulled away from Gull with a rictus of horror contorting his face.

  "You right bastard!" he snarled. "You fucking killed her!"

  Gull had no chance to argue. He had chosen Hawkins not only for his various psychic skills, but also for his murderous talents. When the man had touched Gull, he had learned who was responsible for Jezebel’s fate. Now Hawkins backhanded Gull, driving him to the ground with a pair of quick jabs to the throat and gut. The mage had no time even to summon a spell to defend himself before Hawkins launched a kick at his head.

  "Son of a bitch! All Jez wanted was someone to be loyal to, someone to make her feel like there was such a thing as family. She would do anything for you, and you threw her away like some gutter whore!"

  Hawkins kicked Gull twice more in the head, then in the arms as the mage tried to block the attack.

  Eve and Ceridwen ran at them, but Danny reached them first. He had been spider-walking down from the wound when it began. Now he leaped from the side of Hades’ corpse and somersaulted through the air, snapping his feet out at the last moment so that he crashed into Hawkins with a sort of dropkick that sent the silver-haired man tumbling across the black, blasted earth.

  "What the hell are you doing, you moron?" Danny thundered, his voice no longer his own, but coming from some darker realm. "You’ve killed us all, assclown. You’ve goddamn killed us all."

  For a moment, Ceridwen did not really understand. Then she heard the screams of angry gods from inside the corpse of Hades, and the ground beneath them began to rumble, and the entire wall behind them — the wall that was body of the king of the Underworld — began to tear in places, new wounds being ripped open in a handful of places along its length.

  The ghosts of the gods were marching once more.

  Hawkins had crushed Nigel Gull’s throat with one of his blows.

  The voice of Orpheus had been silenced.

  Eve grabbed Ceridwen by the wrist.

  "Run."

  On the southern slope of the Spartan acropolis the land leveled out and rough, grassy terrain gave way to forest. Between hill and forest was a pit bordered by stone. For just a moment, as Dr. Graves came round the side of the hill and first caught sight of the place, he saw its ghost. Once upon a time the ruin had been a theatre, and imprinted upon the very air itself was the ancient shape of the thing. Though he himself was a specter, they were different sorts of ghosts, and so he saw it only fleetingly before the image gave way to the modern reality. Granite walls were crumbled, the marble stage was only partially revealed, the rest buried beneath the earth as though the theatre was growing up organically from the ground. The rows and rows of seating — where thousands of people had once sat enraptured — were eroded by time, but echoed silently with the laughter and cheers of audiences who had been dead two thousand years or more.

  In the deeper darkness of an alcove — almost a bunker — that had been created long ago by the collapse of a section of the wall, something shifted, moving swiftly and fluidly. If Medusa had come to this place to rest, she had managed little of it.

  Graves moved away from the ruins, backtracking around the hill.

  Clay and Squire were moving swiftly but quietly toward him, their mismatched sizes almost absurd, and yet their approach was formidable. Dr. Graves caught the shapeshifter’s eye and held an insubstantial finger to his lips, shushing them both.

  The ghost reached down to the holsters he wore and drew phantom guns with nary a whisper. There was no leather and no metal, after all. Only the hush of the afterlife.

  He moved swiftly, then, no longer bothering to pretend at walking. He sped around the base of the hill, floating several inches above the ground. He willed himself to fade so that he was nothing more than a ripple in the air and did not even hesitate as the ruins of the theatre came into sight. He rushed past the tumbled down outer walls, past the colonnade, and then down into the pit, passing over the remains of the rows and staircases. Nearly as quick as thought, he swept down into the theater, hovering above the cracked marble stage, and from the lair Medusa had chosen, he heard the hissing of the snakes upon her head.

  The snakes fell silent.

  They had sensed something, or their mistress had.

  But Dr. Graves was swift and Medusa had no time to prepare. She had found herself a cave of sorts, but what she thought was a hideaway had proven not a place to hide, but a trap.

  She lunged from it, snakes erupting into a chorus of hisses, and her fingers curled into claws as she glared around the ruin searching for her attacker. The monster relied upon her curse, upon her gaze. Had Graves been flesh and blood he doubted even invisibility would have saved him from her power. But he had
been tested already. Medusa could do nothing to him.

  Time to find out if the opposite was also true.

  Leonard Graves was dead. That did not mean he felt no fear. Trepidation passed through him in that moment the way that a breeze moved the trees of a willow. It swayed him, but he would not let it stop him.

  Medusa was hideous, her flesh somehow reptilian green and corpse gray at the same time. Her mouth was stretched open as though in some silent scream and long, needle, serpent fangs jutted from within. Her eyes were black, recessed into her face as though they hid in the cave of her skull, yet there was a liquid darkness to them, as though they did not so much see as flow within. She moved in tiny bursts and flinches, a predatory thing, aware of her surroundings. She darted halfway across the stretch of marble, paused, head tilted to one side, and then she turned and looked right at him.

  Graves was a ghost. A wandering soul. If he chose not to be seen there ought to have been no way for her to notice him.

  But she had.

  When he fired those phantom guns it was not to keep her from escaping him, but to keep her coming any nearer. Gunshots echoed out over the ancient ruins of the theater as a new drama began to unfold. The spectral weapons jumped in his hands, ghost bullets seared the world of the living, intruding upon it. Medusa attempted to dodge but the first bullet caught her through the shoulder. The Gorgon screamed and black blood spattered white marble. The second struck her beneath the left breast. The third shot missed but the fourth grazed Medusa’s head, shearing off one of the serpents that grew from her scalp.

  Faced with an enemy capable not only of resisting her cursed gaze but of hurting her, making her bleed, Medusa fled. She darted across the stage and leaped into the crumbling stone seating area. Graves felt almost sorry for this creature, so exposed now that she had discovered herself vulnerable. But then he remembered the dead, the vast forests of human statues, of those stone effigies of her murderous progress across Greece. He swept across the theater in pursuit, phantom guns clutched tightly in his hands.