The Lucifer Messiah (34 page)

As he spoke, Argus sucked a huge breath into his lungs, inflating his chest in an absurdly distended fashion. When
he exhaled, his entire body twisted in a way that no normal person's could ever do, like a band of tightly woven rope uncoiling.

His skirt fell away with the torque. There was no hideous mutant nudity beneath. His lower limbs were somehow merged into one icy-white stalagmite. A delicate shimmer glazed his skin.

As they watched, horrified, his smile dissolved and his eyes fell shut. Then his head melted into the thick of his shoulders.

They would have continued staring, revolted and drawn in at the same time. But the glow of his flesh coalesced, spinning away from his chest in a sudden flare. Those who did not immediately turn away winced and shielded their eyes with their hands.

The burst of heat and flame lasted only a moment. The shadows of the entranceway quickly fell back down over them, except for one place. And that was where they all looked.

Argus was gone. Something far more beautiful, and far more terrible, stood in his place.

“Who?” Maggie said.

“Morrigan,” Sean said.

His voice was now eerily disembodied. It echoed as though spoken from a distance.

When the others turned to see why, they found not three Daughters of Cerberus lingering in the shadows, but four. Their black hoods stood out darkly against the gleaming white cloaks of the encircled Maenads.

“It is over Lucifer. I will spare no one now to end it forever,” the Morrigan said, her hands raised toward the quartet of gatekeepers, three genuine and one an imposter.

A second flare sparked from within her open palms, illuminating the dark again. The light struck the Maenad guards, igniting red flames on the edges of their blades. Without hesitation, they hacked down all four of the canine sentinels.

The savage murders took barely thirty seconds.

Maggie gasped as the four obedient women dutifully fell, none offering up so much as a yelp. Their cloaks covered over their remains when they landed, and the guards wasted no time in spearing the mantles. The Morrigan seemed to float toward them, her fingers glittering with captive lightning.

One cloak came away to reveal a bloodied, pale cadaver. A second revealed the same. Two remained. One, they all knew, was not a Daughter of Cerberus.

The Morrigan waved off her attendants. She would have the final honor for herself.

With one motion, she yanked the bloodied cloaks from both fallen watchers, and found two more corpses.

“My queen!” one of the attendants shouted.

It was a moment too late.

From behind, the first of the fallen ladies rose. Her corpse was corrupted, torn by a dozen gashes and fouled by violent, red-drooling cavities. But even as she stepped toward the Morrigan, the wounds were mending themselves in a mess of bone and blood and jagged flesh.

She was smiling through a toothless, oozing mouth.

The Morrigan nodded. She recognized a fellow trickster and opened her arms. Twin blades were growing out of the pliable shapes of her fingers. She slashed each sword in turn, but the steel passed through the risen corpse like liquid. A Maenad beside her made a third strike, a thrust. Sean's cadaverous torso opened to accommodate the weapon, wide so that the blade cut only air.

The Morrigan recoiled, though the rest of her guards were already in motion. They charged Sean, but his body, whose features had now begun to regain their original form, was too quick.

Sean took hold of, and withdrew the Maenad's blade from his chest. It exited as harmlessly as it had entered. The skin closed up where it had opened to allow the sword entry. With a swift hand, he slashed across a pair of the guardians. Two deformed heads tumbled to the floor, and as the rest watched helplessly, Sean vanished into the haze and the noise of the Molting.

S
WORDS AGAINST THEIR BACKS MARCHED THEM AHEAD,
motivated by the Morrigan's angry command. Behind, the doors that had once been guarded by the Daughters of Cerberus slammed shut. They were sealed off from the outside.

“Enjoy your peek into our world. Brief though it will be,” the Morrigan sneered.

As Maggie looked on, disbelieving yet, the war goddess fell backward into her own shadow. Then, just as she had cast off the physiognomy of Argus like others might discard a coat, the Morrigan shed her human aspect. A glowering black raven grew up from the midst of her remains.

It eyed Maggie with a knowing glare before vanishing into the hidden reaches above.

Their leader gone, the silent Maenads forced the two through a shifting glow of candles, torches, and electrical lamps. Charybdis had taken Maggie up in her arms. She was now too weak to walk.

From her vantage, Maggie couldn't see much. The veil of smoke from braziers and opium pipes stung her
eyes. Tears and shadow-soaked clouds obscured her view. There were people everywhere. Or maybe not people. In the haze it was hard to be sure.

They negotiated a living maze. Charybdis carried her through a sea of tangled flesh broken by occasional vacant eddies. Glimpses and glances hinted at horrors half-drowned in the haze. Screeches and squeals suggested worse. She saw depravity, raw and shameless. She shuddered.

At one turn, a woman was bent over a wooden saw-horse, her wrists and her ankles chained to the base. Red sores and blisters befouled her exposed ass. Two beastly, hunched creatures hovered over her predicament, scandalous delight spread across their faces.

Whips dangled from their hairy fists. They took turns flailing them against her despoiled buttocks. She shrieked with every hard crack of the leather, but Maggie wasn't at all sure if they were screams of agony, or of pleasure. They might have been one in the same.

Just a few yards away, sheltered behind a ragged curtain, four figures sat around a table clothed with purple velvet. Each one was unique, and none of them paid even the faintest attention to the continuous screams stirred up from the whipping post.

Two had heads that were triangular in shape, with a snout-like mouth and nose. Their torsos were elongated and tubular. Both had drooping arms that seemed to lack joints. Each was hairless. Their skin glistened the color of slate, but one had clearly defined female breasts while the other did not.

Something
sat between them with a face that resembled an African ritual mask; wide, long, and flat with tufts of straw-hair jutting up from the crown. Thick, gnarled fur hid its body. Across the table from it was a woman, human in all respects. She was naked and perfectly shaped, but covered in a coat of fine, blond hair.

There was a pint glass in front of her, the mouth covered by a large silver spoon marked with diagonal slits. She placed a series of sugar cubes on the utensil, reciting an adage as she did so.

The slate-skinned one beside her handed up a large black bottle, the glass tarnished, old, and opaque. Only a fragment of a paper label still clung to the face.

She raised and uncorked the bottle, pouring a pale green liquid over the spoon. All four of them breathed in deeply as they watched the sugar cubes dissolve, and the mixture drain through the slits.

Once it was done, the absinthe glowed jade-green. She removed the spoon and set it down. The four joined hands, those with something less than traditional appendages offering what they could to their neighbors. A solemn moment of prayer passed, a phrase repeated by each one in turn.

Then the leader took hold of the glass, sipped it lovingly and passed it to her left. Each one did the same.

“Hmm. That's something I haven't seen in ages, I thought no one was doing it anymore. Even for our kind, the wormwood can be deadly,” Charybdis remarked.

Maggie would have said something, but the next group
snared her attention instead. Her expression said it all. Her eyes were opened as wide as they could go. Her jaw hung down quite un-self-consciously.

“I realize some of this is shocking to you, but it is all perfectly normal for us,” Charybdis attempted to assure her.

“Normal?
That
is normal?” she said.

She pointed to the seven or eight naked males stroking each other's genitals. They were gathered in a wide circle around a bald, blue-skinned woman who moaned deeply as she was penetrated by the organ of a rearing canine.

“Sex with animals is normal?”

“Those animals you see will look like ordinary people in a few days, and some of those ordinary looking people will look like animals.”

“But … still, sex?” she muttered.

“Certainly. Intercourse doesn't have the same meaning for us as it does for you,” Charybdis said, not at all disturbed by the debauchery. “For our kind it's merely one more form of gratification. Because of our constant molting, most of us cannot reproduce.”

She hardly seemed convinced.

Underscoring the squeals and the sighs, and the occasional scream, a rhythmic chant kept constant pace throughout the hold. It was incomprehensible, an endless stream of words. Each one blended so seamlessly into the next as to resonate in a ubiquitous hum. It seemed to have no single source. Somehow, it grew stronger when they stopped at the foot of the towering throne dais, like an invisible, euphonious tide.

“What are those sounds?” Maggie questioned.

She was beyond fear now. The pain in her side had made her weak. All she had left was her horror, and her anger.

“They're called the Odes of Dionysus,” Charybdis answered. “Songs that were ancient when Rome was a village, hypnotic tunes that once heralded festivals in dark, haunted forests. Some say they're meant to drive the revelers into ecstasy. And to drive outsiders into madness.”

“They're not in English. What do they mean?”

“I'm afraid I don't really know,” Charybdis answered.

“Aren't these
your
people?” she asked.

“They are, but in all my years I never learned this language. It's Greek. I know that. A very old form called
Koine,”
the pale changeling replied.

“Why Greek?”

“Tradition,” a familiar voice interrupted. “So I'm told, anyway. This particular custom predates even me.”

It was Argus,
the real Argus.
He was chained like a beast, his neck constrained by an iron collar. The links kept him fettered to the floor of a pit at the base of the Keeper's throne. His limbs were shackled in like fashion.

He smiled, peculiarly, as Charybdis and Maggie were forced to rest upon the damp concrete next to him. The white-robed Maenads clamped manacles on their wrists, locking them all into place in the shadow of the Morrigan's great seat.

“The Havens, where changelings gather in secret today, are the continuations of ancient pagan temples. It was there that our words and our history were born, in the lost days
of Mycenaean Greece. Later, they were written down during the waning years of the Roman Republic. At that time, Koine and Latin were like English and French today,” Argus continued, lecturing like a sage despite his confinement. “We were honored in those times. The pagans saw our molting as a reflection of the endless cycles of nature. Continuous change. Continuous renewal. As the winter becomes the spring, as the seed becomes the flower, and even as the caterpillar becomes the butterfly, so do we change.

“The ancients gave us sanctuary. For many thousands of years they used us in their rituals, and spoke of us in their stories. Now their descendants fear us.”

“Enough of the tales, Argus. For all your distrust of the outsiders, it is by the hand of our own kind that we face death today,” Charybdis gibed.

Argus was about to respond, to admonish his aide, when the Maenads returned. They brought another prisoner. It was Vince. He was shirtless, haggard, and pale. Regardless, he immediately interrupted.

“Maggie? Goddamn Sean! He said he was going to keep you out of this. Son of a bitch!” he exclaimed as he too was forced to his knees and shackled beside the others.

“He tried, I think. No thanks to your friends,” Maggie answered, not nearly as happy to see him as he might have expected.

“My friends? What the hell are you talking about? Jesus Maggie, I don't know what anybody told you, but I'm not …”

“We were sold out! By your ex-partner,” Maggie said,
cutting him off with a sharp tone. “He set us up, told us he was going to help. But he led us right to them.”

Vince shook his head. He banged his hand against the stone blocks.

“Pat Flanagan? No way. Not Paddie. He's the most honest cop I've ever known.”

“Yeah well, all I can tell you is he took us way out of the city, and that's where they got us. They knew right where to find us, too.”

“We did have advanced knowledge. That is true,” Charybdis spoke up.

“I can't believe it, not Paddie,” Vince continued.

A dark and sonorous voice answered him.

“You needn't, Mr. Sicario. Your friend was quite loyal. To the end, I imagine. Little pity, his death, he was an annoying sort,” the Morrigan said.

No longer a raven, she stepped up to survey them from the edge of her dais. The comment was more of a mention. It carried no hint of emotion.

“Loyal, but not at all tight-lipped. And those around him, those within his precinct, owed their favors to Salvatore Calabrese. They were more than happy to keep me abreast of his comings and goings. Truly invaluable in obtaining all of you,” the Phantom Queen continued, floating away into the teeming masses, leaving only the oversized shadow of her opulent seat, just beyond their sight.

S
EAN MOVED WITH EYES SHIFTING IN EVERY DIRECTION,
through shadows and varieties of light. He glided anonymously between the grotesque and the beautiful, seeing for the first time in three decades the celebrations of his estranged brethren.

His every step was registered with utmost caution. The Morrigan could be lurking behind any one of the faces that passed by in the revelry. The Keeper, like him, could change shape at will, and could stalk him without his ever realizing it. For that reason, Sean submerged his human form, the face of his never-faded youth. With every dark corner he slipped into, and every cloud of narcotic smoke that wafted over him, he shifted his appearance.