Christopher Golden - Tears of the Furies

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 the 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."

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.

Danny led the way through the blackthorns. Ceridwen had been hesitant at first. An elemental sorceress, she had a rapport with nature in Faerie, and had always taken for granted how easily she adapted to the nature of Arthur’s world, the Blight. But here she was cut off. The environment was so unnatural that her innate connection to the world around her was disconnected here and it sapped her strength.

She could not feel the trees. Could not touch or sense them. The blackthorn groves were to her like the ghost of a forest.

This was the path they must take. That knowledge had given her the strength to forge ahead, to ignore her trepidation and move amongst those deadly branches. Danny went first, his skin more durable than hers or Arthur’s, and searched for the easiest passage. He blazed the trail and Ceridwen followed. Arthur brought up the rear in silence, but Ceridwen understood. Ever since they had descended he had been attempting to make sense of this place, to understand what Nigel Gull’s purpose here was. Now that Eve had been taken, he was even more haunted. He prided himself on his powers of perception and observation. They were sorely tested here.

Ceridwen paused a moment and blinked. There were places in the Underworld where it was light enough to see easily, but here there were only shades of gray and sometimes the path among the trees was difficult to spy. She pushed back her linen hood and it coiled around her throat. Where was the boy?

"Danny?" Ceridwen called.

A rustle of snapping thorns and branches came from just ahead of her. Startled, she took a step backward. Her tunic caught on a blackthorn tree and the ocean-blue fabric tore as she tried to pull herself free. Her chest hurt as though a hole had been punched through it, this place where she ought to have felt the air and water and fire of this place, where the trees ought to have whispered to her. She felt empty. Drained.

Yanking herself from the thorns was too great an effort. Ceridwen stumbled sideways and fell to her knees, thorns cutting the marbled white flesh of her arm. She swore, mewling in pain, hating the weakness in that noise.

"Ceri!" Arthur cried.

Then he was beside her, blue mist spilling from his eyes. Though he was being affected by the nature of this place, clearly it was not so debilitating for him. He crouched by her and held her arm, plucking out a thorn that had torn loose of its branch and stuck there. She stared at the wounds in her flesh as if the arm did not belong to her, amazed by the searing pain. They would heal quickly enough, even as weakened as she was, but the pain had come so suddenly and it burned like a flame in her mind.

"I don’t understand," she whispered.

Conan Doyle caressed her cheek and she gazed at him a moment before he helped her up.

"What don’t you understand?" he asked.

Before she could answer there came a crack of breaking branches and Danny emerged from the blackthorn trees just ahead. There were scratches on his dark, leathery skin and thorns had caught at his clothes. A branch dragged from one of his sneakers. Yet he seemed barely bothered by the prickers.

"Found us an easier path up ahead," he said, frowning as he saw Ceridwen’s wounds. The demon boy glanced at Arthur. "Figured I’d clear you a trail to get there. The Cyclopes turned out to be a’ight, but he’s no thinker. Might be easy for him to stroll through here, but.. " He shrugged and met Ceridwen’s gaze. "You all right?"

"I will be," she said with an assurance she did not feel.

She rose to her feet with Arthur steadying her, took a deep breath of the dank air of the Underworld, and then together they continued on. He was by her side with one hand at the small of her back as they walked. Though Ceridwen did not really need the support, she did not break away. Down here in the blackthorn forest, in the midst of an ancient death realm, she was so far away from Faerie and from the Blight that the bruises he had once left on her heart seemed to mean very little. Despite his words, her pride had been preventing her from completely accepting that he still loved her, that perhaps his departure all those years ago from her world had been as difficult for him as it had been for her.