by John Shirley
Gatewood stared. “What the fuck are you—?”
“Shhh!”
He reached into an inner pocket and shuddered as he came into contact with the mummified human hand. Thought he felt it twitch against his fingers. He reached past the clawlike hand, found the tiny statuette of Zoroaster, pulled it out—
The footsteps were very close now—
And tied the string around the statuette’s neck, hung it from a stone knob so it dangled in the doorway at about eye level, swinging back and forth . . .
Hope to God this sodding bastard speaks English. They seemed to understand Coggins . . .
Three seconds more, as Constantine and Gatewood pressed themselves to the shadowed stone on either side of the door, and then a man somewhere in the vicinity of six foot eight inches tall, bending to get through the door, came to a bewildered stop, staring at the pendulous figurine as it swung back and forth on a shoestring before his eyes, glowing from within.
Constantine was transmitting the power that made the figurine work by pointing his hand at it from the shadows. He wasn’t very good at transmitting power from a distance. Only a few adepts could do it well in any sustained way.
The man said something in a cryptic Slavic dialect, his voice like rocks grinding together. Constantine caught a few flickers from the thug’s rather dim mind. His name was Zalvich. He stared at the figurine, transfixed . . . and receptive.
“The bastards are devils, who sent you here,” Constantine said. He probed Zalvich’s will, expecting to find it crudely powerful, but it wasn’t; he was the kind of bloke with a powerful physical will who could make himself do three hundred push-ups and run on a hot day till he puked and then run some more, but with a mental will like congealed borscht. It buckled under Constantine’s mind with surprising ease. “They have brought you into a hell, deep underground and filled with dancing demons! Skeletons dance before you! Now they send you back here to fight with demons while they escape! You must find them and stop them. They will explode the device and you will be trapped here!”
“Go after them! Stop them, interfere, and save yourself!” Constantine said urgently.
Zalvich grunted, turned, and walked, with just a trace of zombie stiffness, back the way he had come.
Constantine retrieved his figurine, retied his shoes—he wanted to give Zalvich a chance to get a little ahead anyway—and gestured to Gatewood. The two of them followed the Ukrainian.
The passage was low and narrow, dripping with water in places; it smelled faintly of sewage and the floor was slippery with mud. It wended back and forth, traveling a surprising distance. Under the occasional, flickering lightbulb they made out muddy tracks from the cart’s tires.
At last the passage came to a seeming dead end, dimly illuminated from above, but then they saw the hoist and boom to one side, a rope dangling down beside a metal ladder. Under the hoist, empty of its cargo, was the rubber-wheeled cart.
A blue white beam of moonlight angled down the shaft to them. Zalvich was just climbing the metal ladder, his head turning dull silver like a robot’s as he ascended into the moonlight. Constantine and Gatewood waited till he’d gone from sight over the top, looked at one another doubtfully, and then Constantine shrugged and started to climb.
They emerged from an opening usually covered by locked-down metal doors, flush into the stone dock. But they had been flung open, and now Gatewood and Constantine clambered up to stand at the edge of the River Seine, broad and green brown and lazily shouldering through the city of Paris.
Here the bank was reinforced concrete, a long flight of flagstone stairs down from the street; above the river old gray apartment buildings crowded together, brooding down at them, with only a few lights showing. The river slid by syrup-slow, rank but alive.
To one side a group of men worked at a stone dock where a forty-foot hydrofoil was tied up. Affixed to the rear deck of the hydrofoil was a kind of gantry, wired and tilted upward. So that was how they were going to fire the missile.
The missile was being fitted into the small gantry; Dyzigi was opening the casket near its tail fins. A distant helicopter, a smaller one than Constantine had seen before, perhaps an Apache adapted for civilian use, was approaching over the skyline. Zalvich was . . . where?
And then gunfire erupted, and Constantine saw him, lit up by the muzzle flashes, standing in the deep shadow of the wall; he’d simply opened fire at the men working on the boat. Two of the Ukrainians, caught directly in the line of fire, went down immediately.
“Oh Christ on a Jet Ski—if he hits that bomb . . .”
Gatewood shook his head. “I don’t think it’d set it off. They don’t work like that. But it could spread radiation around. Like—bad.”
Bullets were shooting sparks off the side of the cruise missile . . . Just a cloud of radiation, that’s all . . .
“Me and my genius ideas. Typical. Fuck!” Constantine started toward Zalvich, opening his mouth to shout, but the surviving gunman had returned fire and Zalvich staggered, his gun spitting fire into the dock. Bullets ricocheted past Constantine’s ears with a reek of burning metal, and then Zalvich collapsed, shaking in death.
Dyzigi was walking toward Constantine, carrying the chest he’d had earlier. He was smiling.
Another boat was coming down the Seine. Sirens were ululating in other parts of the city as the police moved in, attracted by the gunfire.
“We’ll never get this thing off,” Simpson shouted. “The wiring’s all shot through here—”
“Constantine!” Coggins roared. “He did this!”
“Yes. Admirable isn’t it?” Dyzigi said softly, walking up to Constantine. “I have misjudged Mr. Constantine. A few minutes ago I took counsel with Mr. Trevino, who has been informed by Dr. Mengele that Mr. Constantine could be of great use to us. His resourcefulness is truly admirable.”
Admirable? For once Constantine was at a loss for words.
Dyzigi reached around in front of the box and opened it. Constantine looked down to see three skulls, side by side in soft wrappings, with eyes in them and carved with runes. All the eyes swiveled to look right at him.
“You will remember who you are,” said Dyzigi. “They will remind you. Because they remember you.”
And all at once, Constantine remembered . . .
15
TO WAKE THE FURIES
Somewhere in the British Isles, the early Bronze Age
Konz had decided to wait till his mother died before going to the Grotto of the People of the Sea. There was still time for vengeance. He waited with her, close to the low fire in their hut of mud and sticks and fir fronds, at what remained of the settlement.
His mother, Selem, an old woman of nearly thirty-four summers, one of the longest lived of the Tin Mound community, was lying on her side on a bearskin, under the sheep’s fur blanket. She was trembling with the King of Death’s footsteps; they came like the heavy hooves of the great horned beasts, and Konz could almost see the King of Death in the shadows outside the hut. But the King of Death was not coming the way another man came from a far place, walking on the surface of the land; he was coming from the world that cannot be seen with the first looking, but only with the second looking.
“Cold, Konz, I am cold,” Selem hissed. Her right eye was abscessed, but it had been that way for a long time, though it no longer had maggots squirming in it, and her left seemed heavy lidded and dull. She was almost bald with the sickness; her hair was wispy and gray.
He threw another stick onto the fire so that she would feel a little warmer, and drew his knees up close, putting one hand on the leather-bound hilt of the bronze knife stuck in the ground beside him.
“Will you not kill the men of the blue paint?” his mother asked him yet again, barely able to speak for her panting, her struggle for breath. She had asked him this many times that day, too many times. He always answered the same way.
“I will kill the men of the blue paint for you, Mother.”
He looked at the way the firelight glimmered in the blade of his knife, and it soothed him as always. The power of fire was entering into it . . . Always he sought ways to make the great powers of the world his power. He had meditated atop a crag during a thunderstorm, calling to Skygod to ask for instruction on how to make lightning spears like Skygod’s. He thought he’d heard a reply at times, a mockery of his pretensions. But also a hint: Some portion of this sky fire can be yours; some portion of it circles round within your bones even now . . .
So much he had heard from Skygod, and nothing more.
He had gone to Bregg, the god-speaker, and endured the foul smells of his speaking—his teeth were rotting out of his head—to hear him describe the marks of the People of the Sea; to hear him speak of which marks bore the greatest power. He had used them to summon the Snakegod from the tarn; Snakegod had risen up before Konz, speaking in his mind: Some portion of my power can be yours; some portion of it swims up and down your spine even now.
So much had he heard from Snakegod and nothing more, before it slipped back into the tarn.
At Bregg’s urging, Konz had spent ten days neither eating nor sleeping, in the deepest forest of the coast lands. On the tenth day he had eaten the red mushrooms and said the Names, over and over, and Greengod had appeared to him, demanding sacrifices and mocking him—but Greengod had told him this much: The sap of the highest trees rises in you, too; it rises in your groin even now . . .
So much had Greengod said and nothing more.
His mother had been fourteen summers when he’d been born to her. Now she was withered and dying because the men of blue paint had killed his father, and they had attacked her and taken her till something broke within her womb, so that she bled unceasingly from between her legs. The men of blue paint had left her for dead; they had killed most of his people. The few survivors had scattered.
There was still a smear of blue paint on his mother’s neck; the print of marauding fingers. He had wished to wash it away, but she would not let him put the water on her for fear it would steal the heat of her body.
He had let them do this to her; he had let them kill his father and the others.
He, Konz, the strongest and fastest young warrior of the settlement, had been away from the Tin Mound settlement, had been wandering in search of the gods of the sea people, those who had come by sea from the Fallen Land, from the land that had crumbled into the sea.
Bregg had told him about them; about their great boats, each as big as twenty of the boats of his own people; beautiful boats shaped like ax heads, with scarlet sails; they wore brightly colored cloth so soft it was like the skin of infants; their metals were harder than any bronze. Some of their magic, too, Bregg had learned as a boy when he was a slave to one of their god speakers; he had only learned a little before the colony from the Fallen Land had been wiped out by disease and the depredation of the men of blue paint. He had learned many of the marks and many of their god summonings; he had learned the names of their principal gods. They had been trying to call on their war god, N’Hept, when the raiders had come. They had called him too late.
“They were reluctant to call N’Hept,” Bregg had said. “They had tried to leave the memory of N’Hept behind. They blamed him for the sinking of their land into the sea. But they knew his power would give them strength to destroy their enemies. They put their reluctance aside, but it was too late. The blue paints came before N’Hept could be summoned. The sea people were weakened from disease—they had no strength against the foreign sicknesses of this new land—and so they were easily killed.”
Now Konz sat by the fire, brooding, blaming himself again for the death of his father and the shaming of his mother. “Will you not kill the men of the blue paint?” his mother asked again, her voice rasping.
“I will kill them, Selem my mother. I know a way.”
This was not wholly true. He merely knew a way that he might try. He could go to the old warrens of the sea people. The remains of their colony still stood. Their altars still stood, and some of their wall markings and magical tools remained . . . He remembered the way there that Bregg had shown him. Bregg was dead himself now. The pain in his mouth and fever in his body had maddened him so, he had finally thrown himself off a cliff.
Konz’s mother had stopped panting and shaking. She lay with the inertness of clay and stone.
The great footsteps had ceased their approach. King of Death had come and gone. Konz’s mind had been distant, in the colony of the sea people, when it had happened.
“Good traveling, my mother,” he said.
He waited a while, singing a song to help her to the far land, and then picked up her body and carried it in his arms, to the barrows.
~
Konz led Barasa and Pel into the Grotto of the People of the Sea, at the base of the high forested hill almost within sight of the western ocean. A low stone cliff stood to their left; its brow was mossy, overgrown with drooping ferns. The ferns thrived from the stream that became a sparse waterfall off the cliff; the falling water sparkled in the late-afternoon sun. The cliff jutted over a damp, lichen-spotted undercut riddled with caves.
“I see no colony,” Pel said. He was a short, angry, heavy-browed figure, his face ritually scarred, his nose split by an enemy’s ax so that now his breathing was rough. He and Barasa had been away hunting when the men of the blue paint devastated the settlement. It was a warm afternoon and like Konz and Barasa, a lean man with a twisted right foot from an accident that Barasa had never explained, Pel wore only a girdle of woven sheep’s fur; all three men bore symmetrical scars on their chests, and their hands and arms were painted red, up to the elbows, to signify preparation for battle. All three of them carried wooden spears with bronze points. Barasa had a long straggly beard; Pel and Konz had carved their beards away.
“They did not use huts,” Konz said. “They were building houses of stone, away to the south, and in the meantime they lived here, in these caves. They were here only a hot season when the end came. But—” He pointed. “You see the marks of their fires; and there, the remains of a boat, unfinished . . .”
“You come here because of their knowledge,” Barasa said, “but their knowledge did not save them. How strong could it have been?”
“Bregg showed me things . . . they were true. Bregg knew.”
“Bregg is dead.” Barasa was always skeptical. If you said there was a herd of the great horned beasts to the south, he would say that perhaps by now they’ve moved to the east.
“Come on, let us look anyway,” Konz said.
“You have not been selected to be our leader,” Pel said grumpily.
“Then stay here,” Konz said. “Or come, as you choose.”
Konz strode into what remained of the colony, immediately seeing the white flash of man bones amongst the plants growing along the edges of the clearing, and green and blue cloth flapping in the thin breeze close by them. The remains of some of the dead sea people, he supposed. He walked along the edge of the stream that ran from the waterfall’s pool, and climbed the gravelly path up beside the falls to the caves.
N’Hept! He called the name in his mind, as Bregg had taught him. N’Hept! Where are you? I’ve come to sacrifice! N’Hept!
There was no reply in words, but he felt a kind of tugging sensation from one of the caves . . .
The stone over the entrance to the cave was inscribed with a magical sigil: the incisings of the sea people. Konz entered the cave, and after a few steps in darkness, he saw, with surprise, that there was light at the back. Had one of the sea people survived? Was someone else camped back there? There could be men of the blue paint here. He drew his knife from his girdle in his left hand, hefted his spear, and stalked forward.
But the light came from a natural hole in the ceiling of the cave, a rugged shaft, a vertical crack really, that rose crookedly up to the hilltop, showing a little sky, diffuse sunlight.
At the base of the shaft were the remains of a stone altar.
On the altar was a broken skull, incised with markings familiar to Konz: the invocation to N’Hept.
But the skull was mostly smashed; an intact skull was needed . . .
“What have you found?” Barasa asked, coming into the shaft behind Konz.
“I have found the place of power I sought,” Konz said. “Where is Pel?”
“He is watching for the men of blue paint.”
“He is afraid!” Konz jeered. A certain giddy energy was working its way up in him. He thumped the butt of his spear on the stone floor and walked back and forth, calling in his mind: N’Hept! N’Hept!
He looked at the images painted on the walls here: the faces of N’Hept and other gods; he looked at the wooden debris, smashed by the men of blue paint; he looked at the shaft of light overhead . . .
N’Hept!
“What is it you do, here? It is foolishness! Their gods have no power,” Barasa said peevishly. “Let us go hunting instead . . . I am hungry . . .”
“N’Hept!” He called the name aloud and in his mind at once. He visualized the face of N’Hept. “I offer you glory and blood!”
“I am going,” Barasa said, turning his back.
Konz shouted, “N’HEPT!” and spun about, swinging the butt of the spear, clouting Barasa hard across the back of the head with it. Deliberately not hitting him hard enough to knock him unconscious.
Barasa staggered and turned, snarling, raising his spear, as Konz had hoped; he could not offer a sacrifice of Barasa if he did not fall in real battle. Murder was not enough for N’Hept.
“Barasa is not fully a man!” Konz taunted. “His feet are twisted and his penis, too! Barasa is an infant to leave outside in the cold!”
That was too much for Barasa, who charged him, teeth bared. Konz sidestepped and drove his spear into Barasa’s throat with all his strength, shouting, “For N’Hept!” The bronze spear point drove deep into the soft flesh of Barasa’s neck and severed his spine; the spear head thrust out on the other side, accompanied by a spurt of bright blood. Barasa quivered, his knees shaking, and then collapsed.
