Tears of the Furies (A Novel of the Menagerie)

by Thomas E. Sniegoski Christopher Golden

  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.

  Medusa scrambled across several rows to a grand stone staircase that would take her out toward the forest behind the theater. Once in the trees, she might easily elude him.

  Clay came down from the sky with the screech of a night bird. He was an enormous white owl. Medusa turned to defend herself, claws slashing skyward, snakes snapping at the air. Her own scream tore across the sky and Graves though that if the ghosts of ancients lingered here, she would have woken them. The last time they had clashed, the Gorgon had turned Clay to stone. Now he took no chances. Even as he dropped down toward her, he changed shape. Medusa lashed out at the owl, but the owl was no longer there. Instead, he was a hummingbird, darting past her face. Then, in the space between heartbeats, he became a Bengal tiger, massive paws crushing ancient stone to powder beneath his tread. Clay sprang at her. Medusa reached for the tiger, prepared to fight it. One of her hands closed on its forepaw . . .

  An octopus sprawled across gray stone, suffocating even as its tentacles wrapped around the Gorgon, crushing her. One of those tentacles wrapped around her throat, but Clay could not retain that form for long without endangering his own life.

  Warping the air and light around him, he changed again, to the biggest mountain gorilla Graves had ever seen. Medusa had been taken entirely off guard. Now she at last got her claws into him, slashing his face and chest. Clay let out the thundering cry of the gorilla and grabbed her by the throat. Serpent hair darted down and bit his hands, even as he raised her above his head and then hurled her with all of his strength at the stone stairs. There came the crunch of breaking bone.

  Medusa flipped onto her belly, managed to reach her hands and knees, preparing to stand in spite of her injuries.

  Now that Clay was out of the line of fire, Graves shot her again. Two bullets struck her, one in the leg and another in the pelvis. She crumbled to her knees.

  From the massive shadow cast by the lumbering gorilla, Squire emerged. The hobgoblin had retrieved the net they had planned to use for Medusa, and now he hopped forward, agile and brutal, and cast it over her. Squire swore loudly as he kicked the Gorgon, trapping her in the net. The snakes on her head hissed at him and the goblin hissed back.

  Medusa thrashed against the net, trying to break free.

  Clay, Squire, and Graves rushed to encircle her so that she could not escape. What she had become was not entirely her fault, but Medusa was a true monster.

  She had to die.

  A shrieking filled the Underworld, whipping around Eve and her companions on a tornado wind. The anguish of dead Olympus, the bitter sorrow and resentment of dead gods, echoed through the vastness of that death realm. Ghost-warriors, the armored remains of ancient gods, tore free of their mass grave within the massive corpse of Hades. Others forced themselves up from the black soot underfoot, rising from the ground where they had once fallen and been forgotten.

  But there were more.

  On the wind.

  Those without bones, without armor or any other remains, simply soared through the air, many of them not attacking so much as taking the opportunity to give voice to their pain, and their madness. They screamed, those spirits, and where they flew and twisted around Eve, their touch scoured her flesh like rough stone. These were no ordinary spirits.

  She had Ceridwen by the wrist and the two had begun to run up the long, steep hill that led back the way they’d come. But Eve glanced over her shoulder and saw that Danny was hauling Nigel Gull off the ground.

  "Shit," she snarled.

  As Danny got Gull to his feet, Nick Hawkins stood gaping like a fool at the gods in the midst of their resurrection. The nearest had been female once, and carried a quiver of arrows across her back. She was nearly out of the ground and Hawkins seemed unable to tear his gaze from her.

  Eve raced back down to them. "What the fuck are you doing? Just leave them."

  Gull was bleeding from a broken nose and a gash in his cheek and his eyes were glazed and disoriented. The demon boy got one of the mage’s arms around him and started hustling him toward where Ceridwen stood up on the black-earth hill.

  "He’s still got serious mojo, even without the voice. We might need him," Danny said.

  Eve stared at him stupidly for a moment. Of course he was right. "Shit," she snarled.

  Someone started screaming behind her, in a voice that sounded like a little girl’s. She spun, claws out, to see that in the moment she was focused on Danny, the resurrected archer had reached Hawkins and was driving him down to the ground, throwing up a low mist of black dust. The goddess of the hunt snatched an arrow from her quiver with skeletal fingers and plunged its sharpened tip through Hawkins’s left eye. He twitched twice, and then lay still.

  "Just my fucking luck," Eve muttered. She had been wanting to kill Hawkins since a few seconds after they’d met, and she felt cheated.

  A trio of screaming ghosts whipped around her, spinning her, scraping her arms and face. Eve swore and snarled, but could not harm them. The others — the ones solid enough to tear apart — were scrambling nearer, but there were too many of them. Far too many.

  She raced to Danny and they held Gull between them, hurrying toward Ceridwen. As they half-dragged the mage up the hill, Eve saw Ceridwen’s eyes begin to glow blue. A weird kind of steam issued from them, and then Ceridwen raised both of her hands. Eve felt a wave of frigid air blast past her and the screams of the disembodied gods were silenced. She glanced behind her and saw several of the giant, armored corpses freeze, ice forming upon them. One tumbled and shattered in the black dust.

  Nigel Gull, still staggering along with her and Danny’s aid, began to chuckle dryly. When he spoke, his voice was a tortured rasp.

  "We’ll all buggered now," he said. "They’ll take us one by one. No way any of us are getting out of here. It’s too far."

  Eve fought the urge to shatter his chest with her fist and rip his heart out. She glanced over at Danny past the burden they shared and saw in his eyes that the words had cut him deeply. Th
ey did not slow him down, however. The demon boy hurried Gull along more quickly.

  They had almost reached Ceridwen when the Fey sorceress pointed down the hill past them. She shouted something, but the howl of dead voices had returned and Eve could not hear her. Spirits spun around her again. Danny lashed out at one but his claws passed right through it. Eve was less interested in these things than in whatever had drawn Ceridwen’s attention.

  She turned again.

  The dead gods were marching after them up the hill, gathering nearer together now, an army of brokenhearted myths out to take vengeance for the spilled blood of one of their own. They trod upon the shattered-ice bones of their fallen comrades and upon the skulls and helms of others still trying to drag themselves from the ground. Most of them were minor gods and demigods, certainly, but she suspected that among them were some of the children of Zeus, the royalty of Olympus, withered and deteriorated until they were impossible to tell from their lesser relations.

  Sad, dead, murderous things.

  But it was not the gods that had caught Ceridwen’s attention so completely. Beyond them, fire had burst up through the chest of Hades’ corpse. Broken bits of the god’s rib cage jutted from the hole the fire had made and flames danced around the bone, charring it, sending swirls of smoke skyward.

  Rising up through that blazing wound in a sphere of crackling flame was Arthur Conan Doyle. And he was not alone.

  "Sanguedolce," Eve snarled, and the name was a curse upon her lips.

  The master sorcerer and his former pupil hovered in the air within that fiery sphere and between them was an enormous metal cauldron filled with gold-and-orange fire — the purest fire she had ever seen.

  Ceridwen took several steps back down the hill, crackling with power, her eyes leaking that same frigid blue mist. As she passed them, Danny, Eve, and Gull all turned with her, staring at the sphere of fire as it rose up above the corpse of Hades as though it were the sun in this ever-night world. Even the shades of the dead gods down on that black field turned and looked up at them as the sphere began to move, burning the air around it. It hurtled toward the place where Eve and the others stood.

  Beside her, she heard Gull mutter under her breath. "Ah, now I see, Lorenzo. I’ve been your fool."

  "What’s that?" Danny Ferrick demanded.

  Gull snickered. "Sweetblood told me what I needed to break Medusa’s curse, but he never worried if I would succeed. It didn’t matter. I used Conan Doyle and all of you as my distraction to slip past Cerberus into the Underworld. Lorenzo used us all to focus the gods’ attention so that he could claim the Forge of Hephaestus. Mad, brilliant bastard."

  "So, basically, he fucked you over the way you fucked everyone else," Danny snarled. "Swell."

  Eve was only half listening by then. She wanted to know more about the Forge of Hephaestus, about exactly what was going on here, but there wasn’t time. The dead of Olympus were distracted for the moment, but it would not last.

  The shrieking ghosts tore through the air, converging on that flaming sphere. They darted at it, battering themselves against it with a crackle and pop like insects swarming around a light. Spectral hands tore at the fabric of the thing, tearing strips of flame away with a ravenous frenzy.

  "That can’t be good," Eve whispered.

  Beneath her feet the ground began to tremble, and then to shake. It buckled and heaved and Eve was thrown down, tumbling once end over end on the slope before stopping herself. The entire hill rocked and she looked around, finally overwhelmed by her frustration and fear. Rage overcame her once more, bloodlust taking her heart, fangs extruding sharply and hands hooking into claws. She glanced around and saw Danny had also fallen and was crouched on the hill like an animal. Ceridwen floated on air currents that she drew around her, cloak whipping around her.

  Nigel Gull was unmoved. Purple-black light coiled around him like a nest of ebon serpents and held him aloft. His nose still bled and his hideous countenance was distorted by a look of such malice that Eve shuddered. How much of his disorientation had been an act she did not know, but he had recovered.

  "What now?" Danny roared.

  Sweetblood and Conan Doyle hit the ground nearby with such force that she felt sure they would be killed. The fiery sphere was like a meteor, burning right into the soil of this hellish landscape. But when the black dust settled and the glow of the fire dimmed, the two of them stood on either side of the Forge, unharmed. It was enormous, at least five feet high and six wide. There was no way to remove it from here without magic, and yet the two mages seemed prepared to lift it.

  "Ceridwen!" Conan Doyle shouted. "Come here! Quickly!"

  Under other circumstances, the Fey would have snapped his neck for speaking to her like that. But now Ceridwen raced across the still-trembling ground toward her lover and the Forge. The hill heaved again and this time Ceridwen did fall.

  There came a thunderous crack unlike anything they had heard before and Eve whipped her head around to look down the hill once more. The dead gods were on the march again, most of them managing to stay on their feet despite the buckling and shaking of the ground. Then, in their midst, the black soil erupted with a giant, skeletal fist easily as large as the Forge of Hephaestus. Parts of that broad, hellish plain collapsed and minor gods disappeared into the yawning maw that appeared in the earth.

  The gigantic, withered corpse that drew itself from the ground then still had some flesh attached to its face, and white whiskers on its chin. Its eye sockets were dark, empty holes out of which squirming white things tumbled as it rose, maggots the size of men. When its other arm burst up out of the earth, Eve saw that it had an axe in its hand whose double-edged blade was the length of an automobile.

  Eve had felt true fear, terror for herself, only a handful of times since she had become immortal. After what she had suffered, few things could frighten her. Now a single bloody tear raced down her cheek and she shook her head, speechless. She wiped the tear from her face and stumbled across the shaking ground to grab Danny by the shoulder and propel him after Ceridwen.

  "What now, Eve?" he shouted. "What do we do now?"

  "I don’t know!" she snapped.

  Danny stared for a moment at the gigantic corpse. Eve could not help doing the same. Beyond the first one, another head had begun to emerge, a cracked skull with one eye still intact, gleaming golden in the shadowed land. The dead gods that had attacked them thus far were only the foot soldiers. These others . . . they were the children of Titans.

  Eve ran with Danny, the two of them rolling from side to side as though they were aboard a ship. Gull followed, whisking through the air, though now the blood flowed even more freely from his nose and she could see the strain even this minimal magic was placing upon him.

  Ceridwen was already at the Forge, and she was shouting at Sanguedolce. "I can’t do it! Never with so many, and not here. My magick isn’t the same! This place isn’t the same."

  Sweetblood only glared at her and then gestured to Conan Doyle to indicate that the problem was his to solve.

  "We’ll help you, Ceri," he said as Eve, Danny, and Gull gathered with the others around the Forge. "We can feed the strength to you, give you whatever you need, but it’s a kind of magick none of us have. The spell must come from your fingers, your lips."

  It was difficult to hear above the cracking of the ground and the screaming of the vengeful dead. Ceridwen did not bother to put her reply into words. She looked at Conan Doyle a moment and then reached out a hand to him. He took it, their fingers twining together. Eve had never seen Conan Doyle so pale, the circles beneath his eyes so dark. He looked drained. But when he touched Ceridwen, they both seemed to brighten with the contact, to come alive again.

  Ceridwen nodded.

  Conan Doyle turned to Gull. "Come, Nigel. You’re needed."

  "Good thing we didn’t kill him, then," Eve snarled.

  Danny was in a crouch, one hand on the ground to steady himself. He glared up at Eve. "Does
this mean we’re getting out of here?"

  She didn’t even dare look back down the hill. "Let’s hope."

  Ceridwen raised her hands above her head. The air seemed to flow to her fingertips and then down her arms, caressing her, swirling around her, beginning a kind of whirlwind current. Her body shook with the effort and blue light sparked between her fingers. Eve shivered with the icy chill that gathered around her, the temperature dropping rapidly. The Fey sorceress moved her lips in silent supplication to the elements themselves.

  Conan Doyle held her hand tightly. Gull took her other hand. Both had once been students of Lorenzo Sanguedolce and now Sweetblood himself stepped behind Ceridwen and — with one hand on the Forge of Hephaestus — placed the other on the sorceress’s back.

  Only then did Eve understand what they were doing. She dropped into a crouch beside Danny and grabbed his hand, then reached out and clutched the back of Conan Doyle’s jacket.

  Danny was staring past her at the dead gods, at the two ancient Titans that were emerging from the dust of history and myth. He barely acknowledged her touch, his yellow eyes gleaming.

  Thunder boomed, shattering the air with such force that Eve winced at the pain in her ears. She glanced up at Ceridwen, but the Fey was deep into the summoning of her spell. The thunder had not been her doing.

  Lightning lit up the Netherworld as though sunshine had broken through into the land of the dead. It flashed, accompanied by more thunder, and then came a series of bolts that burned the air and blinded her. Eve turned to search for the source and it took a moment for her eyes to adjust.

  Beyond Hades a tower had exploded from the ground, a huge silhouette, a monument. The next bolt of lightning streaked upward from the top of that tower and she saw that it was not some structure at all, but a hand. With lightning searing the sky, erupting from its fingers.