"Gull and Conan Doyle, they have a lot in common. Gull likes pretty, shiny, sharp things too.
"So I’d been in Europe for about three weeks on what was probably the most successful acquisitions trip I’d made. I had some sweet stuff. Rostini’s Axe. The Helm of Kyth. Hunyadi’s Daggers. This perfect longbow from Germany, inlaid with gold, with a bowstring made of ectoplasm. A blind man with no arms could hit a gnat’s asshole with this thing.
"I’m in Prague in this little flat Conan Doyle rented for me for a month. I’ve got a whole room just laid out with these babies. I’d had a feeling a few times during my running around that somebody’d been keeping an eye on me. But Tassarian knows all that ninja bullshit and I really didn’t twig to him until I walked in on the guy trying to sneak off with an entire armory."
Squire shook his head. "Idiot."
Clay kept his foot on the accelerator. If anything he gave the car a little extra speed as he checked the rearview mirror again. "Okay," he said. "But how did you kill him?"
The hobgoblin laughed, thinking back on it. "Well, death and resurrection must have smartened him up some, ‘cause that time he sure hadn’t done his homework. I’m ugly, but I’m not stupid, and I’m pretty good with weapons. The moron came to steal my cache in the late afternoon. Maybe he got the whole shadow thing wrong, thinking he shouldn’t try it at night. Or maybe he figured I was out for a walk, or asleep. I don’t know.
"What I do know is, that time of day the shadows are nice and long. The sun coming in the windows threw huge distorted shadows off of every chair, bedpost and friggin’ doorknob. I had a couple seconds’ surprise on Tassarian and that was all I needed. I moved in and out of the shadows, kept out of his range, snuck up on him a dozen times. I must have hit him with every goddamn weapon in that room. Even broke the blade off one of Hunyadi’s daggers in the base of his skull. I killed the guy enough to snuff ten other guys. Just kept killing him until he actually laid down and didn’t get up again."
Another mile of road went by in silence before Clay glanced over at him.
"But Tassarian did get up again."
Squire shrugged. His gaze had drifted past Clay and out the driver’s side window, where the Aegean had come back into view. It was distant, but there. He smiled.
"Yep. Guess I’m going to have to kill him some more."
The hobgoblin glanced over to see Clay smile broadly . . . then the smile disappeared. Clay’s eyes went wide and his arms locked into place on the steering wheel.
"What the hell?" the shapeshifter snarled, even as he jerked the wheel to one side.
Squire turned his eyes back to the road. The ghost of Dr. Graves stood in the center of the highway, one hand on the butt of a phantom gun and the other raised to wave them to a halt.
The tires squealed as Clay cut the wheel too far.
Squire shot a hand out and grabbed the wheel, straightening it out. "Run him down. He’s already a ghost!"
Clay slammed the brakes on and the car slewed to one side as it shuddered to a halt on the shoulder of the highway. A car barreled past them, the driver laying on the horn.
Squire popped his door open and clambered out, scanning the road for Graves. "Where are you, Spooky? I’ll wring your neck! What’re you trying to do, give me a friggin’ coronary?"
The ghost was nowhere in sight. Cursing under his breath, Squire turned and stared expectantly through the windshield at Clay, but the shapeshifter did not get out of the car. After a moment, the hobgoblin went to get back inside, only to find the transparent wisp of Graves’s ghost in his seat. In the interplay of sunlight and the shadowed interior of the car, the specter was nearly invisible.
"I’m sorry if I startled you," Dr. Graves said.
"Sorry!" Squire sputtered. "You couldn’t just have ghosted yourself back into the car like you did before?"
"I needed you to stop," the specter said. "We don’t have a great deal of time."
Clay narrowed his eyes so tightly that his flesh seemed to alter with the expression. "Has Medusa left the train?"
"Oh, I’m almost certain she has. And we’d best hurry if we want to search before the authorities arrive. It’s a matter of minutes, I expect."
Squire’s head hurt. "Search what? You lost me, Doc."
The ghost seemed suddenly more solid, and the expression on his spectral features was bitter. "The wreckage, Squire. The train has derailed."
Dr. Graves pointed to the northeast, where several columns of dark smoke were pluming into the sky. The crash sight was two or three miles away from the highway, but he and Clay had been caught up in conversation and had not even noticed the smoke.
"Damn," the goblin whispered.
Dr. Graves floated right up through the roof of the car and hovered above it. "I think we ought to leave the car here for the moment. We’ll reach the site faster by our own means."
"Agreed," Clay said. He put the car in drive and pulled further onto the shoulder, then locked it up tight.
"Any survivors?" he asked, just before he transformed, his flesh popping and rippling as it diminished. In a handful of moments, Clay was gone and a hawk hopped about the ground in his place.
Dr. Graves floated toward the crash site. "We’ll find out soon enough," said the ghost.
Squire went to the shoulder of the road. Beyond it were only olive trees and open ground, with some power lines in the distance. Clay and Graves flew toward the pluming smoke, just a bird and this blur against the sky that looked more than a little like a jellyfish, distorting the light that passed through it.
"Don’t wait up, guys," the hobgoblin muttered.
He went back to the car, glanced over his shoulder at the power lines, and then dove into the long shadow the vehicle cast on the shoulder of the road.
The darkness swallowed him. His senses spread out through the shadow paths, fingers on Braille, and he began to run. A short time later he emerged from the shadow beneath an electrical tower. He did not step into the sun, but emerging from the darkness he still had to shield his eyes from the brightness of the day. A quick scan of the sky showed him that he was slightly ahead of the hawk and the ghost. Not far from him he saw the railroad tracks. The crash had happened perhaps a mile east. The smoke was thinner, now, wispy.
Like ghosts.
Squire gauged the distance to the crash and slipped back into the shadows. The darkness caressed him as he slipped along the path, feeling the various conduits all around him, touching the shadows intimately. He knew them.
Even so, he almost missed the path he wanted. It was so dark that he did not notice it at first. Then he moved along it and let his instincts feel for the egress.
The hobgoblin slid from the shadows inside the wreckage of the train. The car was turned on its side, windows shattered and metal walls torn like paper. Seats had been ripped from their moorings. Squire breathed through his mouth, prepared for the wretched stench of blood and death.
But all he could smell was smoke and dust.
Confused, he looked around the wreckage. It took a moment for him to realize what he was seeing. There were no bodies. None of flesh and blood, at least.
Medusa had turned the passengers to stone.
The crash had reduced them to rubble.
The River Styx did not crash and churn, no whitewater foamed its banks, yet it ran deeper than imaginable, fast and steady and inexorable in its strength. To attempt to swim its breadth would be foolhardy. Suicidal. And though Nigel Gull knew his soul was likely damned — whatever that really meant — he did not want to discover what would become of his spirit if his body was destroyed here in Hades’ realm. There was the additional complication of Eve. Hawkins carried the vampire over one shoulder. The man was stronger than he looked, but no one was strong enough to swim the Styx carrying one hundred and thirty odd pounds of dead weight.
They had to cross the Styx. And according to both myth and reality, there was only one way to do that.
"This is it, then, huh?" J
ezebel asked.
Gull glanced at her. She looked so small, so young to him now, this teenaged girl who had left her whole world behind for him. He wanted to protect her. But there were other things he desired more.
"Yes, Jez. This is the Styx. It only gets worse from here. We’ve been descending all along, but once we cross the river it will not be a simple thing to get back." He fixed her in his gaze. "In truth, we may not come back at all."
A flicker of fear went across her face but it disappeared quickly. "If you’re going, Nigel, then so am I. What are we waiting for?"
Hawkins shifted Eve from one shoulder to the other, spreading out the burden of her weight, and took a step past them, nearer the river’s edge.
"Isn’t it obvious, love? The ferryman. We’re waiting on the ferryman."
Gull nodded. "Charon."
Jezebel glanced past him and she flinched with a sharp intake of breath and pointed out across the water. "That would be him?"
A trickle of dread ran down Nigel Gull’s back and he shivered, even as he turned to gaze out over the river. In his long life the twisted mage had seen extraordinary things, impossible things. Hideous and terrifying things. They were in the Underworld, now and were about to cross into the land of the dead. Yet the sight of that small craft skimming across the top of the river gave him a chill that made him feel very small, as though he were a child again.
This was no nameless demon, no Slavic bogeyman, no trickster spirit. This was Charon, a figure unique in myth. Not a god, not a man. Not a monster or a demon. Simply Charon, who carried the spirits of the dead to a land of endless nothing, a place of waiting, where waiting was the only destiny, and at the end there was only more waiting. Gull had always envisioned this ancient vision of Hell, left over from the Second Age of Man, as an asylum filled with muttering, ghostly madmen, their eyes darting to follow imaginary pests, their bodies rapt with anticipation of something, anything, that might happen next.
But there would never be a next.
Not on the other side of the Styx.
The fabric of human faith had created entirely new Hells, new spirit destinations, in this Third Age of Man. Gull had reasoned that very few crossed the river anymore.
Yet Charon frightened him. That eternal asylum frightened him.
The ceiling of the cavern was so high above it was lost to sight, and though there clearly was no sky there, no sun, still a strange illumination cast a dim gray light upon the river and its banks.
The boat moved swiftly toward shore. Gull felt he could not breathe and both of his companions seemed equally unsettled. Hanging from the prow of the boat was a lantern whose jaundiced light shone upon the surface of that perhaps bottomless river. The current ran swift and deep and yet the narrow launch was uninfluenced by its power. No sway or eddy nudged that vessel from its course.
In the rear of the craft stood a solitary figure in dark robes the color of river silt. If the ferryman had hands, they were lost within those robes and whatever grim countenance might be hidden beneath his voluminous hood, there was only darkness.
So entranced was Gull by the ferryman’s progress that when the prow of the boat lightly touched the riverbank he flinched away as though he had been slapped. Jezebel watched him, gnawing her lower lip and twirling a lock of her hair in her fingers. Hawkins dumped Eve’s inert body on the shore, her arms flopping onto the damp black soil. The vampire’s eyes were wide and unseeing, but a glimpse of her heartened Gull’s resolve. He thought of all the planning that had gone into this excursion.
He thought of Medusa.
Gull brought up a hand and ran the pads of his fingers lightly over the contortions of his face.
He turned toward the ferryman and though a thin tendril of his dread remained, he ignored it.
"Charon, will you carry us?" Gull asked, and the river seemed to swallow his voice.
The ferryman was perhaps twenty feet away. Even this close no trace of a face could be seen beneath his hood. Charon was entirely still — as frozen in place as his craft — master and vessel unmoved by ticking seconds or by the rush of the unfathomable river. It was as though they had ceased to exist for him and Gull watched him for any sign of recognition. Even so, when it came he was startled.
Charon extended his right hand, palm up. The skin was gray, colorless, and as dry as parchment. There seemed on that flesh the seared imprints of a thousand thousand coins, the images on that currency pressed into the ferryman’s very substance.
Gull hesitated.
The ferryman beckoned with his spindly fingers.
They were not dead. Not yet spirits. But apparently he was willing to deliver them to their destination. Perhaps with so few passengers Charon was not as discerning as he might once have been. Or perhaps the laws that governed this realm had withered away, just as the faith in old myths had, all of them losing their power.
"What are you waiting for?" Hawkins whispered.
Gull had never heard him afraid before. He glanced at the Englishman, saw Hawkins lick his lips. The man’s hands were shaking. Gull nodded twice. They were his people, Hawkins and Jezebel. His agents. He had brought them here. He was the catalyst for everything that was happening, everything that would happen.
Jezebel came up beside Gull and slid her hand into his as though seeking protection. There was ice on her fingers. "Don’t you still have the coin?"
"I have it," Gull said.
His throat was dry as he pulled the silver coin from his pocket. It had been struck in Mycenae in 1404 B.C. and bore the face of a ruler whose name had long since been lost to antiquity. Gull strode to the riverbank, hesitated a moment, and then waded in up to his knees. The water dragged at him and he could feel it leeching vitality from him. He felt unsteady on his feet, and not merely from the powerful pull of the current.
He placed the coin in Charon’s hand. The ferryman inclined his head, hood draping low, then that parchment hand disappeared once more within his robes. Charon once more gazed at Gull, or so it appeared, though it was impossible to know for certain when his eyes were lost in shadow.
The ferryman extended his hand again, palm up, thin fingers scratching the air, demanding.
A flame of anger ignited in Nigel Gull’s heart, burning away whatever trepidation remained.
"What is he doing?" Jezebel asked, coming to the river’s edge. "You paid him."
"Good sodding question," Hawkins agreed. He grabbed the still form of Eve by the arm and dragged her across the muddy bank to join Jezebel. "You said you did the research, that that coin would get us all across."
"I did, and it should have," Gull said flatly.
"Wonderful," Hawkins sneered. "Maybe the fuckin’ price went up. Inflation in the Underworld. Have you got some spell that’ll —"
"There isn’t any magick I know that would force a being like this to cooperate," Gull interrupted, glaring at those thin fingers, at the coin scars on that palm. The latest was the imprint of that Mycenaean ruler, whoever he had been.
Jezebel hugged herself and shivered, staring forlornly at the stark figure of the ferryman, holding out that wretched hand expectantly. "What do we do now?"
The ferryman simply waited, ominous and forbidding. Their transaction had begun. There was no way to know what would happen if they did not conclude it, what he might do. An unseen wind rustled Jezebel’s hair and caressed Gull’s contorted features, but the ferryman’s robes did not so much as shudder in the breeze. The river flowed. Charon remained motionless, implacable in his demand.
"Now?" Gull asked.
He reached beneath his coat and withdrew his pistol, a Robbins and Lawrence pepperbox. It was an original, made in 1849, a breech loader that carried five shots.
Gull put the first bullet squarely into the patch of darkness beneath Charon’s hood. The report exploded out across the river and was lost to the vastness of the cavern above. The ferryman’s head snapped back, but Gull kept firing. The second .31 caliber bullet struck Charon in th
e chest, as did the third. The fourth struck the ferryman’s shoulder as he collapsed, spilling over the side of the boat.
He never fired the fifth round. Gull waded in to catch the creature — the myth — before he could slip into the water and be swept away. He holstered his weapon and drew out a khanjarli, a curved Indian dagger perfect for his purposes. He wrapped his arm around the ferryman’s head, unwilling now to look at the face hidden beneath that hood, and plunged the dagger into Charon’s throat, cutting flesh and muscle, grinding the blade against bone.
The ferryman’s head tumbled from the hood and splashed into the river.
"Oh, for fuck’s sake," Hawkins said, from up on the riverbank.
Nigel Gull let the body slip into the river. Even as he did so, the current caught the boat and it began to float away. Gull caught the prow, the lantern swinging, throwing that sickly yellow light back and forth. At last he turned to look at his operatives, there on the shore. Both of them watched him wide-eyed, Hawkins still standing over the unconscious Eve, and Jezebel hugging herself even more fiercely than before.
"What do we do now?" he echoed, staring at the girl. "We bloody well improvise."
CHAPTER TWELVE
There was a forest in Hell.
Ceridwen knew that this ancient Underworld was not the equivalent of the Christian hell, that it was a repository for all the dead souls of its age, not merely those considered damned. Yet its subterranean nature was enough to force comparisons to all Arthur had told her of damnation. Caverns and flame, barren landscape . . . and yet it was not entirely barren.
The Cyclopes had engraved his map on stone. They could not possibly carry it, but Ceridwen had no trouble committing it to memory. Weakened as she was, she was still capable of that much at least. While the caverns continued to slope downward, luring them farther from the surface world, the Cyclopes had suggested a quicker route to the River Styx, though the blackthorn forest. It was treacherous territory, a broad expanse of hard-packed earth from which grew grove after grove of twisted, unnatural trees. Their trunks and branches were thin and ebony black, ridged with dagger-sharp thorns.
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