Hellblazer 2 - Subterranean (16 page)

Then a thumping sound from above, a reek, and a wave of palpable hatred made Maureen lift her head and look—just in time to see a harpy diving at her.

She turned and ran for the house, and got three steps and then shrieked in pain as the talons closed around her upper arms, one of them piercing the flesh of the muscle above her right breast. The thumping sound—the beating of the harpy’s wings—redoubled its rhythm, and the garden began to recede underneath her. In moments she was looking down at the roof of her cottage, then at the street and the shocked face of Mr. Gardiner, a pensioner who lived across the way from her, the pipe dropping from his gaping mouth as he saw her carried away.

She screamed and struggled, despite the pain. It would be better to fall to her death than die in some filthy nest; she pictured the harpies tearing her apart, feeding her alive to little harpies, like an eagle feeding its young, and she struck at the harpy’s scaly legs, to no effect.

Up, up, the jerky ascent was accompanied by the rhythm of the harpy’s beating wings, until they were nearly to a ledge jutting from a hole in the cliff-wall of the cavern enclosing the village. Pale men—were those men?—in black armor, blades and spears and crossbows in their hands, came out on the ledge and stood out of the way, awaiting her. Their faces . . .

She screamed once more—and fainted.

~

Constantine looked out the barred window of the prison cell at the town of Danque below. They were in a malodorous circular room in a columnar tower, with a pile of rags in the corner offering the only bedding, a wooden bucket their only plumbing.

“Not quite the Tower of London,” Constantine said, glancing around while lighting a cigarette with a practiced flick of one hand.

“Give us a brown, John!” Geoff said, staring at the cigarette.

“You can have this one when I’ve smoked it down halfway,” Constantine said. “Got to conserve.”

“This cavern’s sort of like the one the village is in,” Geoff remarked, peering out the window. “Except even bigger. Shite, who knew all this was down here.”

“That bastard MacCrawley knew,” Constantine muttered. “Or found out. Question is, why didn’t
I
know? My job is to know those things. Didn’t take Scofield seriously enough . . .”

“Your job? You’ve got a job?” Geoff asked dubiously.

“If it’s not my job it’s my . . . responsibility, like. ’Course, I’ve heard about the Underlands, but I always thought it was like that Hollow Earth mythology. Didn’t look any closer at the literature. My oversight.”

“This ain’t the center of the Earth. But it’s close enough for me,” Geoff said. “Come on, give me a smoke.”

Constantine handed him the cigarette. “You shouldn’t smoke. I shouldn’t’ve started up again myself.”

“I thought we had a plan, John. I don’t recall you mentioning being locked up.”

“I expected to be incarcerated, or under guard, for a while. But I’ve got a call in, so to speak, to the King—and I think he’ll see me. I’ve got to convince him I’m the magician who can renew his body for good.” He glanced at the locked door—he suspected someone was listening—then winked at Geoff as he added, “And of
course
I can.”

Geoff nodded and put his finger beside his nose. “But . . .” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “They know me from the village. How will they think . . . realize . . . I’m your apprentice?”

“You
remember, I sent you into the village and there was a bit of a misunderstanding, they didn’t realize you didn’t belong there?”

“John,” Geoff said, his voice an even softer whisper, “what about that spell that . . .” He mimed opening a lock with a key.

“If we have to.”

“Might be too late if we wait for—”

“Hey—apprentice?”

“Yes, uh—master?”

“Do me a very large favor, and shut your pie-hole.”

Geoff shrugged, straightened his specs, and blew smoke out the window, watching it drift out over the capitol of the Underlands. Their tower actually rose from the corner of a fortress wall that enclosed the Palace of Phosphor. It was the palace that drew the eye. It was an almost perfectly preserved palace from at least half a millennium in the past; peaked roofs topped with serrated spikes of iron stretched achingly up toward the ceiling of the vast cavern, as if the palace wanted to push its towers beyond the ceiling and penetrate to the upper world. The outer walls were decorated with flamboyant traceries, the windows with intricate designs in leaded glass. The whole, interconnected by walls decorated with ornate figures in iron, pulsed faintly from an inner light.

“You recognize the architecture?” Geoff asked.

Constantine shrugged. His hand moving with a will of its own, he took out his pack of cigarettes, started to take a cigarette out, and stopped himself. He looked at it wistfully and put it back in his inside coat pocket.

“It’s Late Gothic, of course,” Geoff observed airily. “The Perpendicular style. You see the fan vault, there? It’s like the Rayonnant thing you see in Gloucester Cathedral—they insert tracery panels into the vault—”

“Hang
on,” Constantine exclaimed. “Where’s all this coming from? You making it up?”

“I’m going to study architecture, once I’m in college. Been reading up. The history of buildings is dead fascinating.”

Constantine cleared his throat. “You mean, as a hobby. When you’ve”—he tilted his head toward the door—“finished your apprenticeship with me.”

“Oh. Yeah. After that.”

Constantine looked out the window again, studying a gargoyle on the eave of a building, and was startled to see it spread its wings and fly off. “Not a gargoyle—a harpy!”

Geoff stared at the harpy as it flapped over the rooftops. “I’d be gobsmacked by that sight.” He shook his head and exhaled a long slow breath. “Except nothing surprises me now.”

“Then stand by to take that back, mate,” Constantine said. “There’s always another rabid rabbit in the hat.”

“The city down there,” Geoff remarked, “beyond the palace walls—totally different architectural style, like something from Pompeii. Looks older, too. That must be what Balf was—
ow!”

Constantine had jabbed him to keep him quiet. He mouthed,
Don’t mention Balf you git!

They heard the tramp of boots outside the door then, and a key turning in a protesting lock. The Captain of the Fallen Romans stood in the doorway, crossbow in hand. His distinctive winged helmet—the ornaments on the sides shaped like bat-wings—seemed to denote rank. Several other soldiers waited behind him in the narrow landing, short-swords in hand.

“You gents here to have a cuppa with us?” Constantine asked, with mock congeniality. “We’re a little short on tea. Also on water, fire, pots, cups, and crumpets. But I’ll see what I can do.”

“Adesdum!”
the Captain commanded, in a high-pitched, petulant voice.

Constantine had a fair command of Latin, something a reader of ancient books on magic needs, and understood the Captain as saying, “Come here!”

“Could be this is the audience with his nibs, apprentice,” Constantine said in an aside to Geoff, with a sharp look to remind him of the role he was to play. “Come along, then.”

They went onto the landing, and were escorted down through the turret on a spiral stone staircase and out to a rampart built right up against the outer walls of the palace complex. The embrasures enclosing the ramparts were edged by iron spikes, some of them decorated with moldering human heads. Geoff stopped in his tracks and stared at one.

“Oh shite!”

“Better keep moving,” Constantine whispered, as a sword-wielding guard jabbed him warningly from behind, not quite hard enough to get through his coat.

“That—I
think”
—he stared transfixed at the head, a middle-aged man from the surface—“I think that’s my history teacher, from school!”

Constantine grimaced. “Could be. They might’ve decided to make a few public examples of some who didn’t do whatever they’ve brought the villagers down here to do. Come on, or we’ll join him up there—and watch what you say.”

“Confuto!”
the guard commanded angrily.
“Hoc agere!”
Silence, continue onward!

Geoff swallowed, letting Constantine pull him along by the elbow and they continued down the open-air walkway. From here they could see people moving through the distant settlement below, even a few children. Most of them seemed paper-white, like the guards, but a few darker individuals stood out from the rest.
Genetic aberrations or the result of kidnappings from the surface?
Constantine wondered.

He glanced back at the guards, and looked more closely at their faces. They were fleshed; the skull effect came from the dead-white skin, the extremely upturned noses which were little more than holes in their faces, the lipless mouths, the sunken eyes. A form of albinism, and some inbreeding problem.

They were both outdoors and indoors: on the top of a wall, outside the buildings, but within the cavern. Hundreds of yards overhead was the blue-glowing ceiling, like the one over the village, though this cavern was even bigger. As Constantine watched, it grew darker, the light source increasingly obscured by a gathering of dark clouds covering the ceiling. The swift movement of the clouds and their unnatural thickness suggested magic at work.

“It’s getting darker,” Geoff observed, a catch in his voice revealing his growing fear.

“I reckon the King Beneath, as Scofield called him, likes a day and night cycle to try and keep a sense of time,” Constantine theorized. “He’s got a spell going to make those clouds gather this time of day. It’d be just sunset up above.”

As the cavern grew darker, the palace’s own inner glow, barely visible before, now pulsed eerily into prominence, making it seem to shine with the potency of the King Underneath. It would have a powerful psychological effect on his subjects, Constantine supposed, living literally in its shadow.

They reached the end of the wall and were herded down a staircase to a courtyard. There were horses here, tethered to iron rings in the walls of wood-and-stone barracks—white, eyeless horses with enormous legs, short backs, and tusks like those of boars.

“Them horses have got no eyes!” Geoff blurted.

Constantine looked at him, suspecting the boy had been through too much and was about to panic. He squeezed Geoff’s elbow hard. “Keep your wits about you, Geoff,” he whispered, “and we’ll get you out of this to the upper world, I promise you!”

The boy nodded, chewing his lower lip, and Constantine silently asked himself:
Should you be making promises you can’t keep to people who matter?

They entered the great central building of the palace through a side door and found themselves in a low hall that seemed in a sad state of decay. There were Gothic and early-Renaissance decorations on the wall, often framing murals showing alchemical signs, representations of alchemical vessels, and runic invocations to power. But most of these were difficult to see, streaked with mildew, peeling away. The occasional article of furniture was leaning, skewed, splintery. The light came from the walls themselves, and in some passages from strips in the floor, intermittently pulsing crystalline panels. Since they pulsed at different rates, enough were illuminated at any given moment that the light never completely failed, but the effect was of a sputtering power source. The palace’s air smelled of incense, mold, cooked meat and, faintly, of rot.

Up ahead two sagging doors, flanked by sullen, bored skull-faced guards leaning on their pikes, opened onto the throne room. The prisoners were hustled into the throne room, where a clutch of other prisoners waited—watched by a lazing circle of guards—in the center of the throne room’s polished black-marble floor. The two thrones on a dais at one end of the glittering high-ceilinged room were empty. It appeared they awaited the pleasure of the King. The general impression given out by the room was of a gigantic music-box, tackily ornate, with gems studding the columns along the walls; golden traceries on the walls set off panels painted with fantastic images of a kingly figure wearing a five-pointed crown, standing with his foot on the neck of a troll—resembling Balf but fiercer-looking—like St. George about to slay the dragon.

Constantine turned his attention to the other prisoners, one of whom was glowering angrily at him. Two of the prisoners seemed to be ragged, pallid men from the settlement below the palace, presumably miscreants who’d transgressed some local law; the other two were captives from the surface, if captives they were. One of them was MacCrawley, the source of the baleful glower. The other, Constantine didn’t know—a tweedy, balding little man whose expression alternated between muted terror and an attempt at magisterial snootiness.

But as they were chivvied to stand with the other prisoners, Geoff identified the stranger with a whisper. “That’s Lord Smithson, from the manor by the village! Owns more than half of Tonsell!”

“His property value has gone
down,
then,” Constantine observed dryly. Adding more loudly, for MacCrawley’s benefit—for Constantine’s old enemy was standing just a few steps away—“Lovely room, in a kitschy kind of way, to be held prisoner in, eh MacCrawley?”

“Bah! Go the devil, Constantine! For good this time! I’m no prisoner here. I have been summoned to an audience with His Majesty! King Culley and I are old friends!”

“I had ‘an audience’ with a copper, not long ago,” Constantine said. “Had to spend the night in the drunk tank. Threw up my supper. Thought of you about then, mate, as I was looking at the upchuck. And here you are! Funny old world, innit?”

“Maneo captivus!”
the Captain of the guards ordered them. Wait here, prisoners!

And the darkness thickened in the chilly realm of the Gloomlord.

8

THE NIGHT HAS A THOUSAND EYES

T
he sickly, pretty lady with the blond, elaborately coiffed hair had been at work over Maureen for several minutes, cleaning the wound over her breast, washing and bandaging it, humming to herself all the while, before Maureen really came to herself on the silk cushions of the gloomy but lavish room.