by Rowan Casey
Hooting, the harpy hopped from one taloned claw to the other in glee. It made me want to shoot it. Badly.
“A cock!” she screeched. “A great red cock!”
I waited for them to settle down enough for my voice to be heard. They began closing in. “A cock! A cock!” they crowed.
I looked into the bright bird eyes of the harpy. She was grinning but it faded as she saw me shaking my head. She could feel the bounds of the Veil which encompass the fey and their kind filtering around her.
“I’m sorry,” I lied. I wasn’t sorry even a little bit. I went on, “I meant a key.”
The place came apart.
Chapter 22
The harpy leapt into the air screeching in rage, wings beating spumes of fetid air into me. Gagging, I backed up to the door and brought the pistol around. Harpies are intelligent, they’re dealmakers same as vampires, but they’re a lot less intelligent. Stupidity often meant a dangerous level of impulsiveness.
“We have a problem?” I asked. Time to start letting the foul things know that I wasn’t afraid to fight. “We struck a deal, you lose. By the Veil, keep your bond!”
“We know your witches,” the harpy said. She was positively pouting.
“Go on.”
“They entered, same as you. Little one and big one.”
“Yes.” Christ, she was dragging it out.
“But we knew the big one, from before,” she said. There was a sly tone in her voice I did not like.
“She had come here before? The big one?” I asked. Erica, continuously throwing me curves. I don’t think she would appreciate being called the “big one.”
“She knew a riddle so we struck a bargain, for her to enter Cantre’r Gwaelod.”
She’s already been to the ruins once, I thought. This is new.
“Why did she come back?” I asked. If she’d already been to the resting place of the hamper, I wondered.
“Ours are not the only riddles,” the harpy said as if this explained everything.
Maybe it did, I thought. Maybe she didn’t have the answer and she left to get it. This explained why she hadn’t just snatched the artifact and ran, she needed to stall, first Kay, and then me, until she figured out the riddle.
“But on this trip?” I asked. “And what did she offer as toll?”
The harpy’s grin was every bit as wicked as Euryale’s, though entirely revolting. Her teeth were gray needles in a bed of black gums flecked with flesh and stained with blood.
“The witch gave a witch!” she hooted. She seemed to take this as the height of humor.
I watched her hop in glee from one clawed foot to the other while her Greek Chorus clucked approval. I blinked, taking this in. Erica had, of course, only been in the company of one person that I knew of.
“Let me see the toll she offered,” I told them.
I thought the harpy was going to play sly in search of some advantage, but it turned out she was more than ready to boast. She took to the air in a great flapping of wings and hovered about ten feet up before settling back onto the ground.
“Show him the prize!” she cackled.
In a moment, from the ceiling of the mezzanine directly above me, I heard a thump and heavy rustling. The harpies began singing out in a deafening clamor and then I watched one of them flutter to the ground clutching a body.
Clarice.
Despite my better judgement, I gave up my position at the door and stepped forward. That witch had rung my bell, she was an slick, evil kill machine on steroids, and to see her helpless was jolting.
She couldn’t see me back. Her eyelids, like her lips, were sewn shut with catgut thread. Naked, her body so covered in blood and dirt she was clothed in it. She didn’t make any sound, and when the harpy dropped her the last two feet to the floor she fell like a rag doll, hands and legs bound.
This turn of events caught me by surprise.
Erica’s betrayal of her protege was damn near biblical. The force of will it showed was indomitable. The disregard for any life other than her own was psychotic. Do what thou will shall be the whole of the law, I thought.
Clarice was evil. A murderer. Not just a human who had killed, or could kill again, but a demonic pact signatory endowed with preternatural speed, strength, and savagery all for the sole purpose of killing.
I was not going to risk stopping Erica getting her hands on the Hamper in order to rescue her. I had already tarried too long as it was. Once upon a time Clarice had been something other than what she had eventually become. That person might have been able to be saved, but not this one.
“Bon appetit,” I told the harpy.
The monstrosity seemed disappointed I wasn’t more excited by the magnitude of her get. She hopped forward once again and I retreated a step, putting me right back next to the door.
I couldn’t seem to get out of this room, I realized. There isn’t going to be a definitive moment of closure, I thought. Just goddamn leave. So I did.
I shut the door in the harpy’s face, cutting off my vision of the helpless Clarice, and turned around. Cantre’r Gwaelod stood before me. I inhaled. It was as if the city had only just risen from whatever watery depth had held her hostage for millennium.
A great cobblestone plaza surrounded by Cyclopean structures spread out before me. The stone was damp and the air stank of brine. The stink of it left a vile, salty taste on my tongue. Piles of kelp and seaweed lay strewn around, surrounded by the bodies of dead fish. Little pools of seawater stood where shallow depressions had formed in the ancient stone. I caught movement out of the corner of my eye and turned to see a crab scuttle from one pile of uprooted sea grass to a soggy mound of brown sargassum strands.
I walked forward. I didn’t bother trying to block the door into the temple structure once I closed it. Harpies don’t have hands. There was a hole in the ceiling of the strange edifice from which they must emerge, like bats from a cave, when hunger drove them.
Do not ask me how harpies had come to inhabit a building adjoined to a long sunken city. Time is a funny thing in these little side pockets of reality sandwiched between the Veil and our world. If the Veil was like the ocean, hiding worlds from our eyes, and our Earth like the shore, then these little dimensions were the seafoam that surf leaves on wet sand, each bubble a part of the whole, but autonomous from the rest.
I took the opportunity to drop the empty magazine from the pistol and replace it with the spare. The sky above my head was a pale yellowish smear, no hint of a sun to be seen. I was not positioned well to see beyond the city, which was encircled by and large with a crumbling wall of stone in much the same manner as the buildings.
On the fate of Clarice, I did not think again. Fates found at the end of the left hand path are often ignobile. These are the rules of play.
Turning in a slow half circle, I scanned my surroundings. I saw a gate, rusted portcullis down, then a cracked and ruined fountain holding the dark brown dregs of the seawater that had drained from the city as it rose. Around the fountain stood five or six one story stone buildings, doorways dark rectangles where fragments of wooden doors, now rotted away, had once stood.
Beyond the buildings, on the far side of the fountain, I saw the long house that must have been, or even still was, the hall of Gywenddo Garanhir. If I had approached the city for some reason from the main gate and were given a choice, I would have first inspected the temple structure first. But since I had already seen both crypt and congressional, I made my way toward the great hall.
“You should have stayed away,” Erica called. Her voice echoed strangely.
I turned, looking, but did not see her. “I saw Clarice,” I shouted back. “She didn’t look well.”
Her peel of laughter rolled down the stone braced alley between two buildings, but when I looked she wasn’t there. I took the pistol up in both hands and edged forward.
“She’d have done the same to me,” her voice called out.
“I never would have done to
you what you did to me, though,” I replied.
I caught a flash of movement and turned in that direction, but when I blinked all I saw was an empty doorway. I moved toward one of the buildings, determined to get my back against a wall.
“It’s too late for guilt,” she said from behind me.
I spun.
She moved with unbelievable fluidity. I blinked and she was a blur of motion. I threw up an arm and only managed to raise it just in time. She raced past me and threw a haymaker of a punch. Her fist, rock hard, slammed into my upper arm, driving it into my face and jerking my head back. I staggered under the force and came up against the wall. The pistol went flying. My arm was almost numb from the force of the blow. I threw both arms up in front of my face and hunched over like a boxer covering up.
I sensed the motion, turned toward it, and she hit me on the other arm, up high by my wrist. Sharp pain shot through the radius bone of my forearm and the palm of my hand drove back into my nose. It popped like a grape and blood gushed like water from a culvert.
“Die!” she screamed.
I dropped to one knee, arms still up in a bulwark before my head. She missed her swing and turned on her heel in a perfect pirouette to throw a roundhouse kick into me. I managed to take it on the shoulder and she sent me ass over tea kettle so that I tumbled, sprawling out across the ground.
I got you right where I want you, I silently informed her. My joke failed to amuse me.
Erica appeared above me. I drew in my legs to kick out and she punched me in the face, cracking my skull against the worn stone. Galaxies of stars exploded in my head and my ears rang. Moving on instinct, I rolled to one side and she slammed another blow into the space my head had been.
She screamed a wounded animal sound and recoiled from the pain in her hand. She began kicking me with one leg as she cradled her hand. I took the kicks on my thigh, then suddenly rolled into her, jerking my legs wide before snapping them together around her calves in scissors motion.
She went down and I tried rolling onto her. She didn’t want to grapple. One, she didn’t know how, and two, her enhanced speed and strength gave her less of an advantage in that sort of an engagement. The hand that had slammed the floor dripped with blood from the torn skin of her knuckles, but the other swiped at me, wicked nails going for my eyes.
I turned my head but was too slow.
I screamed then.
The razor's of her nails struck me in the right temple, dug in, dragging furrows through my eye and down the upper cheek and nose. The bitch had taken my eye. I screamed again and instinctively lunged up, wrapping my arms around her upper body in a bear hug.
The pain reduced me to an animal frenzy. Erica could kill me, no question. Her demonic pact had made her degrees of physical capability beyond human. But I wasn’t going to lie down and die. I lunged upwards and bit for her neck, getting her jaw instead.
I bit down hard, grinding my teeth through her skin and yanking back my head. Her blood, hot and slick, spilled out over the both of us. We rolled, locked together. She got an arm free and clouted me upside the ear.
The force of the blow stunned me and I slowed. It was all she needed. Her fist caught me a vicious backhand blow that painted the ancient stone with my blood. She leapt to her feet and caught hold of my throat with both hands.
I gagged as she cut off my air and she jerked me up and off my feet. I grabbed her wrists with my hand and tried kicking her. She held me above her head and I looked down into the bestial snarl of her face. She tossed me and my arms and legs windmilled as I flew.
Impacting the ground stunned me so deeply I didn’t feel pain at first, just a sort of confused displacement. I lay there, unmoving, and in the next gasping breath the pain flowed into my body. Agonized, I lay there, fighting for breath and looking up. She appeared.
Her dark eyes found mine and she smiled. In the next instance she leapt upwards and came for me. I tried rolling, but it was as if I were chained to the ground. I thought my back might be broken for one terrifying moment.
At the last moment my body obeyed my commands and I turned as she came down hard. I rolled back toward her, trying to wrap my arms around her legs. I got hold of one and hugged it, drawing in tight. Her fist hammered my exposed back, the blows so heavy I felt them in my lungs.
“You lose! Die!” she howled. “You ruin everything!” Her words were barely coherent.
I’m pretty close now, I thought.
I pulled myself to my feet as she thrashed and hugged her belly to back in a suplex hold. Her elbows came back hard but I took the force on my shoulders. She jerked and I used her own momentum to start the slam.
Picking her up, hands locked around her waist, I arched my back and took us both over backward to the ground. I tried with everything I had to drive her skull into the stone, but I could tell as we landed that she’d gotten a shoulder up to absorb some of the force.
We rolled and the suplex slowed her enough for me to scramble for position. She dealt me a short, straight shot to the chest, and I grunted heavily under the impact. I threw an open hand strike into her throat in return and she stumbled back in surprise, both hands flying to her neck. I hadn’t crushed her throat, but that shot had hurt and she was shocked.
I tried following up, but once again she was too fast. Her cross came in and hooked me upside the head and I went down. Rolling up into a defensive ball, I tried somersaulting away but when I got to my feet I saw that she, inexplicably, had turned and ran.
She didn’t like that throat shot, I thought. It reminded her she was still mortal.
I got to my feet a little slower than I would have liked. Breathing hurt and I think the floating rib on my right side was broken. I was seeing in slits from the swelling around my eyes, and the back of my body was one long bruise from the occipital lobe of my skull, to the calcaneus at my heel. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I’d just had my ass kicked.
“Goddamn hate witches,” I muttered. Then stop sleeping with them, I thought.
The building Erica fled into was different from the rest. Set off the central fountain like the other structures, it was a domed shape building one story high without windows. Unlike the other buildings with their Cyclopean construction of large, irregular stone blocks without mortar, this one was almost seamless.
Wary, I entered the building. It was cool and dark inside, and I was immediately confronted with a flight of stairs. I went down warily and found an open metal disk like a manhole cover shoved off to the side of a circular opening. A two and a half foot long iron chisel lay to one side.
I picked it up and looked into the opening where I saw a metal tunnel running down into the dark. Set into the wall of the vertical tube was a ladder, also made of the metal. I climbed down two stories then walked down a metal tunnel into a room.
Time to end this, I told myself.
Chapter 23
I was in a room of seamless corners and doors without hinges. Around the chamber, silent, colored lights flashed incandescent cadences in stations that reminded me of nothing so much as apothecary tables. Looking at several, I saw windows looking out upon impossible geographies as if from altitude.
I didn’t understand what I was seeing or how it played out in terms of either King Gywenddo or his Hamper. My understanding meant very little at the moment. Gripping the bar, I crossed the room.
Immediately, I was brought up short by an iris-door.
I II III V VIII XIII XXI XXXIV LV
I looked up at the string of numbers etched into the metal of the strange, circular door. Set in the wall beside the door sat an ancient cenotaph displaying numerals on small, individual slates.
“One, Three, Five, Eight, Thirteen, Twenty-One, Thirty-Four, Fifty-Five.” I read the numbers to myself. “Is the rend beyond this door?”
“This is what stopped her the first,” I mumbled. My voice sounded funny coming around my swollen and split lips.
“Twenty-One, Thirty-Four, Fifty-Five. . .”
I read aloud, trailing off. Numbers. Just meaningless numbers to me. But numbers are not meaningless. “All magic is mathematics,” I murmured.
“Outsmarted by Gywenddo Garanhir.” I whispered to myself. It was he who’d held the Basket, the Hamper, when Cantre’r Gwaelod sank. “Just one of many in a long line. . .” I looked up at the numbers. “A long line? A sequence perhaps?”
In that moment the answer came to me.
“Sequence. Sequence!” I laughed. The sequence of al-Khwarizmi, from his book of calculations, the Hisab Al-Jabra wal Mugabalah. Classical education. I’ve mentioned its benefits a few times now.
The code was a sequence of numbers arranged so that the next number was the sum total of the two numbers directly preceding it--the Fibonacci code of thaumaturgists. Erica was cunning, but mathematics was not her area.
“Thirty-Four, Fifty-Five,” I calculated. “Eighty-Nine.”
My fingers found the individual plates of the cenotaph and I executed the calculations easily, instinctually punching the numeric code.
LXXXIX
The round door opened like the iris of an eye dilating. Stepping through, I stared out into eternity. Beyond the door an endless black canopy of space yawned out into distances too great for the mind to comprehend. But beyond even that, shimmering in colors of azure and cobalt, stood the Veil. And, beyond the Veil, mankind’s doom.
Air rushed out of the space behind me into the trackless void. Stars spun in distant points of light spread out in successive, endless contours. Mute, I took in the vertiginous panvista, seeing clusters of constellations to which I did not know the names.
A giddiness clutched me in a sort of agoraphobic panic. I sagged against the rough cut stone of the doorway, chisel loose in my hand. I forced myself to look away from the impossible and see the immediate.
