Then his feet touched stone. The traveling wind subsided too quickly, giving them no chance to halt their momentum, and Conan Doyle stumbled forward, dropping to one knee. Only Ceridwen’s grip on his hand kept him from sprawling across the floor of the cavern. But his love was the only one who alighted gracefully. Danny and Eve struck the ground hard, tumbling painfully but rising uncannily fast.
Gull staggered several steps and then dropped onto his hands and knees, blood dripping from his broken nose. He trembled weakly for a moment before getting ahold of himself.
Conan Doyle glanced around. The traveling wind had brought them as far as it could, within this hellish world. They were at the mouth of the tunnel through which they had entered, perhaps thirty feet wide and forty high. In comparison to the vastness they had seen, it was narrow. It was ordinary. He looked back the way they had come and only then did he see Sweetblood. Conan Doyle had been wrong to think only Ceridwen had managed to alight with any grace. Lorenzo Sanguedolce stood casually in the tunnel beside the massive Forge of Hephaestus. It gave off light and a strange heat that lent a warmth to the body without searing the skin.
Puppets, Conan Doyle thought. We’re all puppets.
He strode to Sweetblood and the mage raised a single eyebrow, regarding him coolly.
"I know the threat this world faces," he told his former mentor. "We would all have aided you. You could simply have asked."
Sanguedolce’s nostrils flared. "It would have gone far more smoothly had the temptress not slain Tisiphone. I might have come and gone with none the wiser. That would have been best. As for your help, I have no need of it. When the time comes to face the DemoGorgon, perhaps you can serve again as you did this past day, as a distraction. As fodder, to buy me time for the real battle."
Conan Doyle was a gentleman, but in his life he had also been a soldier. Yet neither of those facets of his spirit could summon a response to Sweetblood’s appalling arrogance. They were all silent, each of them having heard the exchange. Ceridwen, Gull, and even smartmouthed Danny Ferrick, all stared at Sweetblood in amazement and distaste.
Eve was frozen by her shock for only a moment. Then she launched herself across the cave. "You cocky motherfucker! You’d still be back there being Zeus’s fucking chew toy if it weren’t for Ceridwen. This thing, the DemoGorgon, it’s you the Big Evil is coming for, right? I say we just make you dead, and then it’ll ignore us again."
She sprang at him, murder on her face. Sanguedolce put one hand on the Forge of Hephaestus and simply gestured with the other, and Eve was engulfed in flames. Her scream could have wrung tears from the damned.
Conan Doyle leaped between Sweetblood and Eve, his hands clenched into fists that crackled with swirling golden light.
"That’s enough, Lorenzo. You’ve done far more than enough damage by now."
Ceridwen raced to Eve’s side, fingers sketching the air, and Conan Doyle felt the superheated air drop eighty degrees in an instant. The flames that had momentarily touched Eve’s flesh were snuffed and frost formed on her charred skin and scorched hair.
Danny tensed to spring, but Conan Doyle gestured for him to stay back. The demon obeyed, but with obvious reluctance.
Sweetblood smiled at Conan Doyle. "That’s right, Arthur. Call your pets to heel. As for it being enough, I concur. We’ve all gotten what we wanted. Or, at least, what we needed."
His gaze shifted and Conan Doyle glanced over to see what had drawn Sanguedolce’s attention. It was Gull, who sat on the stone floor of the cavern with a glass vial of blood held up in his fingers, staring at it as though it were the world’s largest diamond and he could study its facets.
Eve wasn’t so easily distracted. Her skin would heal, but she would still feel the pain. Enough so that she abandoned the colloquial jargon that was so much a part of her modern persona. "Hear me, o’ man," she snarled, baring fangs that gleamed in counterpoint to the blackness of her charred flesh. "There shall be a reckoning."
Sweetblood sneered. "Oh, yes. But you won’t even be on the battlefield by then, dear one. This is so far above you — "
"Shut the fuck up."
The words came from Danny, but it was clear from his tone that they were spoken not in anger, but in fear. All eyes turned to him. The demon boy had walked deeper into the tunnel, just past the place where the Forge of Hephaestus sat, burning. Now Danny turned to take them all in with a glance, his yellow eyes wide.
"Do you hear that?"
Conan Doyle narrowed his gaze, peering down into the tunnel. He could see nothing save the same orange glow that had greeted them upon their arrival here. But Eve had left off her rage at Lorenzo and she stepped past him to join Danny.
"Screaming," she said, her voice low. Then she turned toward Conan Doyle. "The ghosts are coming. The dead gods, the ones that are nothing but spirit now, they’re coming after us."
Behind him, Nigel Gull laughed. "Or perhaps they simply want out."
Conan Doyle swore under his breath. If the dead gods escaped the Underworld, there would be catastrophe and slaughter. The specters were bad enough, but he suspected that they would not come alone.
The Underworld was another realm, a twist of the fabric of reality away from the world of Conan Doyle’s birth. A barrier existed between dimensions, as it always did, but magick could open a portal or build a bridge. The portal between the Underworld and his own world was represented physically by two enormous stone doors, or gates.
He turned toward them now, glancing up at their height. "We’ve got to get them open. Now."
"No more voice of Orpheus," Danny muttered.
"We’ve wasted time," Conan Doyle snapped, glaring at Sanguedolce. "Come, Lorenzo. The gates must be opened, and then closed again once we are on the other side."
The cave floor trembled slightly beneath their feet. The distant wailing of anguished spirits came along the tunnel, audible at last to the rest of them, and growing louder by the moment. Sanguedolce turned and caressed the Forge of Hephaestus.
"Damn it, man! You didn’t come in here without an exit plan!"
The ground shook so violently that Conan Doyle staggered backward. Ceridwen steadied him and then leaned on him herself. The cave split, a crack splintering across the floor and widening moment by moment, each time with a sound not unlike the profound snapping that came up from deep ice melting.
Conan Doyle glanced down the tunnel again. Nothing was in sight yet, not monsters or resurrected gods, but it was a matter of moments, he knew.
"Come on!" Danny snarled.
Eve held on to him.
Sweetblood shrugged. "My magick could free us. That was my plan. But there is a faster way." He pointed at Ceridwen. In the gloom of the cave her own slim, angular features seemed almost ghostly. "She is tied to the elements, to nature. The gates are of this world, and of that. All she must do is commune with the elements of our own realm, and the doors will open for her."
Conan Doyle nodded, then spun on Ceridwen. "Go. Do it."
She shook her head, confused. The cave shook harder, debris and dust falling down from the roof above them. "I don’t know if… I’ve had to adjust to the nature of this place. I am not certain if — "
Nigel Gull choked his hoarse laughter again.
Eve rushed across to Ceridwen, grabbed her arm and propelled her the last few feet to the massive crack that went up toward the roof showing the seam between the doors. "Just fucking do it. No time for doubts, princess. Get us out of here."
The ground shook again and Eve went to her knees. Ceridwen braced herself against the stone gates, her hands on either side of the seam. Conan Doyle held his breath as he watched her trembling not from outside stimuli, but from within. Her eyes lit up with a familiar blue glow, and they began to change color. Green and fiery red and white-gray and at last, night-black.
Black mist leaked from the edges of her eyes. Purple-black energy began to glow around her hands, spreading up her arms. It was tainted magick, the same hide
ous shade as he had seen Gull wield from time to time, but this was the base elemental nature of this place. Ceridwen was in tune with it, sharing her nature with it.
She screamed in anguish and disgust and threw her head back, her eyes oily black, her mouth gaping open. The gates in front of her began to glow with that bruise-black energy.
"Ceri!" Conan Doyle shouted. He ran at her, reaching for her.
His wrist was caught in an iron grip and he spun, raising his free hand to attack, a spell coming to his lips. Then he saw that it was Danny who had grabbed him.
"We’ve got to get outta here and get the door closed from the other side," the boy said. "You know that. Maybe you should focus on keeping us alive in the meantime."
His fangs were longer, now, and the horns had grown during their time in the Underworld. Danny looked more the demon than ever, and yet in his voice he was still the boy, unsure of himself, trying his best to face up to the horrors that he had thrown himself into, to the truth of who and what he was. Conan Doyle had let his emotions interfere with rational thought for a moment, and he was ashamed of himself.
Ceridwen screamed again, but he turned his back on her.
"Come, then. Let’s buy her the time she needs."
With a crash, the ground shook again. Sweetblood stood beside the Forge, his entire body engulfed in a crimson flame, staring back along the tunnel. Eve grabbed Gull by his jacket and hauled him to his feet.
"Get up, asshole. We might need you."
Conan Doyle stood beside Danny and while Ceridwen was busy trying to get them out, the five of them rode the cracking, undulating stone floor of the cave and waited for the hordes of resurrected myths to attack. The shrieks of disembodied gods grew louder, whipping with the wind through the tunnel, and Conan Doyle narrowed his eyes as he realized that they weren’t just voices anymore.
He could see them.
Like heat distortion above the blacktop on a July day, they obscured the view of the far end of the tunnel, where it turned to the left and downward. The spirits had just appeared but they were swift, streaking toward the gates with malicious momentum. From this distance and in the gloom he could not make them out as distinct from one another. Instead they were a wave of spectral hatred, flowing upward.
The tunnel shook again. Debris showered down from above. A shard of rock struck Conan Doyle on his left cheek and cut him. He hissed with pain and put a hand to his face, glanced down a moment to see the blood on his hand, and only when he had looked up did he see the shadow that had begun to obscure the orange glow at the far end of the tunnel. A massive, skeletal hand and a battle-axe. The shadow moved and in a moment had blocked all light from that direction.
The dead gods still shrieked, hurtling up the tunnel at them, but he could not see them any longer. The only light came from the Forge and from the magick crackling around Sweetblood’s body and Conan Doyle’s own hands. And from behind…
A blinding flash of blue lit up his peripheral vision, illuminating them all in stark silhouette. So bright was the light that it shone deep into the tunnel and for just a moment Conan Doyle saw the specters of gods screaming nearer, perhaps a hundred yards away now, and deeper, the march of an army of bones. With that image still imprinted on his retinas he spun in search of the source of that bright flash.
Ceridwen shuddered as though she were having a seizure, hands pressed against the high stone doors ablaze with purple-black light that flowed like mercury over her upper arms and spilled like cloud-tears from her eyes. The doors themselves radiated that same magick so that it seemed to be seeping from the stone rather than flowing from Ceridwen. But that dark glow had diminished somewhat, and the color was lightened by the bright blue light that blazed in the crack between the doors. It swirled with shades of blue, ice and sky and river, all shifting in the pure, brilliant glow that seemed only to grow.
In tendrils, the elemental magick of Earth slipped through into the underworld and ran across the inside of those enormous doors, the gates of the Underworld. Like lightning it leaped through the seam and touched Ceridwen, merging with the black energy that consumed her, tinting the color of her eyes and the magick she summoned. Through the clash of light and magick, he saw that Ceridwen was weeping, but there was a beatific smile on her lips.
Swirls of blue light slipped into the dark field around her and she was thrown back, away from the doors. Ceridwen fell to her knees amidst a shower of debris from the ceiling of the cave. Sparks of conflicting colors danced in her eyes and from her fingertips.
"Arthur!" Sweetblood shouted.
But he did not turn, this time. All the dead of Olympus might be upon them in a moment, and he would not leave Ceridwen to suffer alone. He ran to her side, stepping over a splintering crack that raced along the tunnel floor, and he knelt by her.
Reached for her.
Ceridwen glanced up at him. Her chest was heaving and her face drawn, sickly. The elements of two dimensions warred in her and the conflict was churning inside her.
"Arthur," she said. "Time to go home."
She staggered to her feet, reached out her right hand, which was swathed only in pure blue light. Though the light in her eyes was still tainted, she had managed to summon a connection that was devoid of the netherworld’s darkness. Ceridwen touched the doors.
They blew outward as though a hurricane had slammed into them, and the light of dawn over the Mediterranean spilled in. Conan Doyle saw the sea churning far below and relief washed over him. Despite the peril they still faced he felt a smile stretch his lips… and then Ceridwen collapsed.
"No!" the mage shouted, reaching to catch her before she could tumble to the stone floor.
With her in his arms he turned to call for the others, even as the ghosts overtook them. Their screams were so loud that spikes of pain shot through the sides of his head. Vicious spirits spun in the air, several of them reaching for Eve, lashing at her. Where they battered against her, the charred flesh of her arms and face was scraped away.
"Oh, you bastards!" she snarled.
Conan Doyle held out a hand and an arc of green, ethereal light leaped from his fingers. When it touched the ghosts, they all ceased their screaming, stopped their swooping attacks. Danny had been about to defend himself when the spirits that had been diving at him began to drift aimlessly.
"Come!" Conan Doyle shouted. "They’re mesmerized, but it will only last a moment! Danny, take Gull."
The demon boy snarled and leaped over to grab hold of Nigel Gull. They joined Eve and the three began to run toward Conan Doyle, where he stood with Ceridwen by the yawning gates of the Underworld.
Sweetblood still burned with crimson flame. He stood beside the Forge of Hephaestus facing the march of the dead. Conan Doyle had bewildered only a small number of the ghosts, the first to reach them, and now the others were focusing their attention on Sanguedolce.
"Lorenzo!" Conan Doyle shouted. "We must close the gates!"
The archmage glanced over his shoulder, a sly grin on his face, as though this were the most enjoyment he had experienced in quite some time. Then he raised both hands, fingers contorted in a pattern Conan Doyle had never seen before, and he screamed as though he had been run through with a saber. Crimson fire erupted from not only his hands but his entire body, spikes of it thrusting outward to skewer each of the dozens of spectral gods that surrounded him.
They had been shrieking in rage before. Now they cried out in agony, were engulfed in that same red flame, and one by one they winked out, snuffed from existence.
Sweetblood touched a hand to the Forge and it levitated off of the ground. He turned to face Conan Doyle. "Go, you fool! What are you waiting for?"
With that, Conan Doyle turned with Ceridwen and, supporting her, hurried out of the Underworld and into the morning light of his own world. They stepped onto the ledge below the massive stone doors and then leaped out into the air, floating the twenty or thirty yards down onto the narrow, rocky shore. Then they stumbled into th
e water together, knee-deep in the blue-green Mediterranean. Eve, Danny and Gull were not far away… the vampire still healing, and fortunately still under the influence of the spell Gull had given her to protect her from the sun.
The roars of rage and cries of anguish from the open doors echoed out across the water. The ground even here shook and loose stones tumbled down into the sea. Then, with a crash, the sound was cut off. The shaking of the earth subsided.
Conan Doyle spun to see Sweetblood hovering in front of the cliff face, the Forge of Hephaestus floating in the air behind him. The doors had been slammed closed. The arch mage had a single finger out and the fire that poured from his body was sealing the gates, leaving only molten rock where any entrance might have been.
But once more his attention was torn away from the crisis at hand. Ceridwen fell to her knees in the water, waves washing around her, and began to vomit. Black bile spilled from her mouth and dripped from her nose. Purple tears slid from her eyes.
"Ceridwen," Doyle whispered, and he dropped to his knees in the water beside her. "Are you all right?"
A foolish question, but it meant something else, of course. Not was she all right, but was she going to be. Ceridwen nodded, trying to catch her breath, marble complexion somehow even more pale, if that were possible. She bucked and vomited again, hyperventilating between heaves. Her hands slipped out from under her and she dunked face-first into the water, but the black, unearthly stuff she had thrown up had already dissipated in the water.
When Conan Doyle drew her up from the sea, the waves still washing over her, there was a kind of relief in her eyes and now at last he realized what had been different about her complexion. Blue veins ran beneath her skin, lightly visible beneath the whiteness of her flesh. They had been more numerous and darker when she had first emerged from the Underworld.
"Is she all right?"
Conan Doyle flinched as he heard Eve’s voice. He glanced up and saw the concern on her face, and he nodded. "I think so, yes."
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