Tears of the Furies (A Novel of the Menagerie) (36 page)

The masts of fishing boats swayed on the horizon. Smaller
boats were tied up at the docks, silent but scarred with the wounds of their
history, of hard work and rough seas. The smell of dead fish receded as he
crossed the span of rutted earth between shipyard and dock, and he breathed
more deeply of the moist, heated air. It had started to blunt even his
prodigious appetite and he was pleased to be away from the stink.

Squire thought smoking was a filthy habit. Except, of
course, on the rare occasions when he felt like having a stogie. He reached
into the inner pocket of his coat, fingers pushing past the steel razor he kept
there, and withdrew a fat Cuban cigar.
Fidel. Hell of a guy
, he thought.

"Gonna have to commandeer one of these," he
muttered aloud, scanning the sea again, evaluating the fishing boats. He didn’t
want a trawler. The speed on one of those old, choking things would have driven
him apeshit. There was one that looked like it might actually be a charter
boat, kept up nicely, outfitted for the sort of thing where businessmen paid to
go out and have someone bait their hooks, and reel the fish in, and all they
had to do was hold a rod for a few hours in between. But it probably had a
decent engine.

Sails were okay for a backup plan, but the hobgoblin didn’t
trust them. And he wasn’t all that enthused about the physical exertion they
required.

It didn’t hurt that the charter-looking boat probably had a
galley full of food.

He used his sharp thumbnail to pop the end off of the cigar
and clenched it in his teeth. A quick check of his pockets produced a lighter. It
was always extraordinary what a hobgoblin might find in his pockets that hadn’t
been there moments before. It was a bit of magick luck, and Squire thought it
was about the best quality a guy could be born with, even better than a
startling endowment. Or close, at least.

The lighter flared in his hand and he puffed on the cigar. The
tip glowed in the dark as he slipped the lighter back into his pocket. Impatience
was part of his personality, so it was difficult to relax, there at the edge of
the sea. He smoked the cigar, his exhalations pluming in the air, and he
sighed. Squire had his heart set on that boat.

With his incredible gift, Clay had been following Medusa’s
trail south from Corinth.

"What the hell does it look like?" Squire had
asked him.

"Chewing gum," Clay had replied. Then, after the
hobgoblin had shot him a hard look, he had shrugged. "It does, in a way. Like
bubble gum that someone has chewed and started to stretch out to an impossible
length."

Weird shit
, Squire thought now. But it worked. He and
Graves had followed Clay, and Clay had followed this invisible ghost-line that
connected victim and killer. It had led them here, but unfortunately it didn’t
stop here. The ectoplasmic trail that Clay was following stretched out across
the water, which meant Medusa had left in a boat. She could probably swim, but
even a creature of myth couldn’t stay afloat forever. Given her curse, the only
way the ugly thing could have left the shore was with the help of someone else.

Squire chuckled under his breath and took another draw on
the cigar that was almost a sigh. He snorted the smoke out through his nostrils
and chewed on the end a bit, rolling it in his teeth. As he did so he walked a
bit closer to the docks. There were nighttime shadows down there, the moonlight
throwing the space beneath and beside the dock in a darker shadow than seemed
natural.

"Seriously," he said. "How stupid do you
think we are?"

Even as he spoke, he turned, knowing he was swifter than any
opponent would guess a creature so truncated might be. His right hand thrust
inside his jacket and he pulled, snaps tearing fabric, brandishing the flail he
had retrieved from Conan Doyle’s armory. Nineteenth-century Indian, the weapon
was little more than an iron bar with two long chains attached to one end, a
heavy metal ball dangling from each chain.

Squire had the flail swinging even before he was certain of
his opponent’s location. But his eyes were used to shadow and he saw Tassarian
immediately. The resurrected assassin was all in black and a veil was drawn
across his face beneath his sunken eyes. Tassarian moved with such swiftness
and precision that Squire could not have evaded him.

It mattered little.

The walking corpse was a master of weapons, but so was
Squire. Tassarian’s great advantage had been surprise.

Tonight, he had lost that advantage.

Squire swung the flail, darting toward the killer. Tassarian
tried to block the attack — it would have been impossible for even him to
dodge — but the iron balls struck his face, cracking his cheek as the
chains wrapped around his arm. The dead man grunted and started to reach his
free hand up to try to free himself.

"No chance, dumbass," Squire barked, cigar still
clenched between his teeth.

He cracked the flail like a whip, snapping the bones in
Tassarian’s arm with a loud pop. From the thin scabbard clipped to the back of
his pants the hobgoblin drew an ornate, seventeenth-century Italian stiletto. He
tugged Tassarian toward him. The assassin used the momentum to attack. Leather
rustled as Tassarian shot a kick at Squire’s head. The dead man underestimated
him again. Squire stepped in closer, hauled on the flail’s handle to use
Tassarian’s own broken arm to block the kick. The dead assassin hissed in pain
even as he stumbled, off balance from the conflicting momentum of the kick and
the twist of his arm.

Squire jammed the stiletto into Tassarian’s left eye. The
blade plunged through the orbit and into the skull with a wet, sucking sound,
spiking into the dead man’s brain.

But the killer was already dead. He shot his hand out, fist
striking Squire’s chest hard enough to have killed a human. The hobgoblin
staggered backward, losing his grip on the handle of the flail. Tassarian took
two steps nearer to him, silently glaring with his remaining eye. The dead man
plucked the antique stiletto from the ruined eye, blood and white fluid
dribbling out of the socket. With the black mask covering his face, his
expression was unreadable. He snatched the end of the flail with his good hand
and began to unravel it, ready to use it.

"I wish we had time to really make a night of this,"
Squire said, smiling, twisted lips pulling up into a sneer. He’d kept the cigar
between his teeth through all of this, and now he took a long puff on it,
stoking the embers at its tip. "You got the drop on us last time. Hurt us.
It’d be nice to take our time. But we’ve got places to go. People to see."

Tassarian barely reacted at first. Then the dead man dropped
into a defensive stance, head tilted to listen to the night around him. Squire
did not even bother attacking him, but watched as Tassarian spun around to see
the ghost of Dr. Graves shimmering into existence just behind him, phantom guns
drawn. The assassin swung the flail but it passed right through the specter,
and Graves pulled his triggers. Ghost bullets punched through Tassarian’s dead
flesh and he jerked several times, staggering, forced backward.

Clay was waiting. He darted forward, a small, sleek Persian
cat, but the air rippled above him as he ran and by the time he reached
Tassarian, he had transformed into a massive Bengal tiger. It shed the night
like water as it grew, and then Clay leaped at Tassarian. Dr. Graves shot the
killer again and the dead man danced as the tiger fell on him, tearing his left
arm from its socket with a single swipe from its massive paws.

The hobgoblin and the ghost watched as Clay tore Tassarian
to pieces and scattered them throughout the shipyard and the docks. Squire
would have liked to linger over the killing, but they had no time. Even the
twenty minutes the task consumed was too long.

When they had stolen the boat Squire had been eyeing, Graves
took the helm and Clay stared southward, still following the ectoplasmic trail
Medusa’s last victim had left behind.

Squire stood at the back of the boat, Tassarian’s crushed
skull in his hands. He waited until they were several miles farther down the
coast before tossing it into the Mediterranean. It bobbed on their wake several
times before slipping beneath the surface.

"This time stay dead, you prick."

Eve had walked the Earth a thousand times, had witnessed the
birth of religions and the death of empires. She had studied the worship of
civilization and tracked her vampiric offspring through the mythology of every
region of the world. She knew precisely what these women were.

Women
. The word itself was entirely insufficient.

The Kindly Ones. The Madnesses. Potniae. Praxidikae
. They
were the Furies, the Erinyes, and though she herself was ancient and cruel in
her fashion, Eve could only stare at them in terrible wonder. The sisters had
emerged from the gaping hole in the corpse of suicidal Hades, the armored
remains of a god the size of a small town. They had crawled headfirst toward
the ground, talons hooked into the rotting flesh of the lord of the Underworld,
and then dropped the rest of the way, landing with uncanny lightness and ease.

Megaera, Tisiphone, and Alekto. But though they did not look
precisely alike, Eve could not tell them apart. The myths had not described
them in detail, of course, for who might have gotten close enough to tell such tales
and returned from this place to do so? Which had made her wonder, in that
moment, if this was to be the end for her as well.

The Erinyes were far taller than any ordinary women, thin
and elegant, their features regal and beautiful. They were cloaked in strange
garments, sheer and torn, that barely hid the pale flesh beneath. They had no
armor, yet there was nothing vulnerable about them. They moved with a grace and
power that was intimidating, yet they seemed cautious as well, not coming
directly at their prey.

Each held a whip in her hand, barbed all along its length,
and the whips seemed to twist of their own accord with the menace of deadly
serpents. When Eve heard the hissing sound she assumed that it issued from the
whips and only as the sisters drew nearer did she see the tiny snakes nesting
in the dark hair of the Furies.

Blood streaked their faces in vertical stripes like macabre
war paint. It took Eve several moments to realize the sisters were actually
weeping blood. Their eyes were red orbs too large for their thin features and
another part of their myth came to her, then. Gaea had been enraged at Ouranos,
the Earth furious with the Sky, and she enlisted the aid of her son Cronos. Cronos
attacked Ouranos, wounding him, and from the blood that was spilled, the
Erinyes were born.

Born of blood.

"Erinyes!" Nigel Gull called as the women strode
across the black, dead soil of the Underworld toward them. "Eumenides,
please accept our obeisance and lend me your ears."

The mage turned his misshapen face toward Hawkins, who
nodded quickly and knelt, his weight puffing black dust around him. Jezebel
gazed at the sisters as though she were a foundling at last discovering her
true family. Her eyes were bright with hope and she ran her tongue over her
lips, a tentative smile on her face. The Erinyes trailed their whips in the
black dust, barbs dragging on the ground, and the things moved and darted with
their own life. Jezebel followed the movement of the whips.

"It’s you," she whispered, and the words carried
to Eve. "It’s really you."

Eve pitied the girl.

Gull put a large hand on Jezebel’s shoulder and forced her
down. She turned a fiery glance upon him, but then realized what he wanted and
she nodded, chagrined, and knelt quickly, the mage falling to his knees beside
her.

"Down," Gull demanded, and Eve had no choice but
to comply.

The four of them were on their knees as Tisiphone, Megaera
and Alekto came nearer. The ethereally sheer cloaks that draped their forms
moved, like their whips, of their own accord. Now that she was on her knees,
Eve heard more than just the hiss of the tiny serpents twined in the sisters’
hair. There was another sound.

A chorus of weeping and cries of despair.

Eve pushed her fingers in the fine, black sand beneath her,
eyes downcast. Her heart felt vulnerable to attack and she imagined herself
becoming part of that dead land’s soil. What would grow in her, she wondered? What
deathless sapling would take root in her ancient dust?

She thought for a moment that the weeping was that of the
Erinyes, the source of the bloody tears upon their cheeks. But there were too
many voices by far, some sounding very distant and muffled and others a whisper
in her ear, so nearby that they seemed almost to brush past her.

Just at the upper edge of her vision she saw one of the
sisters step in front of her, the hem of the Fury’s cloak swaying. Eve would
have tumbled backward then, tried to leap up to her feet and protect herself,
but the voice of Orpheus controlled her. Thus far the Erinyes seemed to be studying
their visitors, curiosity drawing them slowly closer. But the air of sorrow
that emanated from them was stifling, smothering Eve.
Where are their
victims?
she wondered.
Where are the damned of Hades’s netherworld
?

The voices grew louder. Eve blinked, and then she knew. She
understood. Her gaze narrowed and she focused on the hem of the punisher’s
cloak. The fabric was unlike anything she had ever seen, shifting and unstable
as though woven of mist . . . but even as she studied it Eve knew it was neither
fabric nor mist. There were faces in the texture of the cloaks of the Erinyes,
with eyes and mouths open wide in cries of agony and endless despair. Damnation.

Fingers that seared her flesh with a touch lifted her chin
so that she was looking up into the Fury’s face, and then she saw those eyes
and she knew they were not really eyes at all. They were tiny pools of blood
that spilled like tears, and yet though the creatures’ faces were streaked, not
a drop fell.