Christopher Golden - Tears of the Furies

Inside the gigantic corpse of the lord of the Underworld.

Icy currents tugged at Ceridwen, wrapping her in a shroud of her own cloak. For just a moment — or perhaps a handful of moments, not enough to steal her life — she had lost consciousness in the water. The Styx raged around her, pulling at her limbs, caressing her, as though the spirits of the river were fighting one another to claim her.

She awoke choking, drowning, but then her violet eyes snapped open and she flailed her arms, kicked her legs, righting herself in the water. Ceridwen closed her mouth and swallowed the water that was in her throat, mind racing, blackness threatening the edges of her thoughts as her lungs cried for breath.

Arthur.

That was her only thought.

Her hands were empty, so she thrust out her right hand and bright orange fire — unaffected by the river’s rush — arced from her fingers. This was no ordinary fire. It traveled through the water, darting in a lightning path, until it found her broken elemental staff being dragged along the river bottom by the current. Tendrils of sorcerous fire gripped the staff and drew it to her. Before it even reached her grip she was gazing around her in the water again, fighting the current, swimming.

Scylla and Charybdis hated Arthur. In its way, the river hated him as well. Ceridwen had no idea how Gull had accomplished this, but that was a question for later. For now, she could use it. In the past when she had traveled from Faerie to the Blight, it had taken time for her to adjust. But despite the corruption of the human world, its soil and air, its water and vegetation, were not so different from Faerie. The underworld was something else entirely. Dark and twisted, things grew that should have been dead. Lifeless, terrible things that somehow thrived. Her bond with the elements had withered upon her descent into this nether realm but she had become acclimated to it. It sickened her, yet now she embraced it, for it was her only hope.

If the River Styx hated Arthur, and she could touch the river, commune with it…

Ceridwen stopped fighting the current, let herself be swept by it. The water was all around her and now her body shimmered with a dusky light. The river hated Arthur, which meant it was aware of his presence… she touched the water, and she searched for him.

There. At the riverbank, but deep beneath the surface, dragged along the edge and dashed against rock and black earth. Arthur.

The fire that glowed within the icy sphere atop her staff flared once. Ceridwen had hesitated to connect too fully with this world, but now she mustered all of her elemental magick. The current changed direction around her, the water grasping her and propelling her toward the riverbank. She rose to the surface and she burst up into the air to take several deep breaths, caught a glimpse of the strange sky, the cavern ceiling so high it could not be seen in the gloom.

Then she willed the river to drag her under again. It curled around her, swept her to where Arthur drifted. She saw him kick feebly, trying to swim to the surface. Weak, but he was alive. His hands reached upward and she grabbed his wrists and though the river hated him, she forced the water to propel them both upward.

The Styx erupted in a spout of water that tossed them onto the riverbank. Ceridwen struck the ground hard and for a moment she could only lay there, catching her breath. Her chest hurt as if there was something broken inside, and she prayed it was only her need for air. She heard Arthur coughing beside her with a wheezy rasp, but he was alive.

She turned her head, forced herself onto her hands and knees and crawled to him. Finally she knelt and put a hand on his back as he caught his breath, and then he fell into her arms and she held him, simply held him, the way they had done so very long ago, when it hadn’t taken the threat of death to make them see what they were to each other.

"Ceri…" he began.

"Sssh, no, Arthur." She pushed damp locks of hair away from his forehead so that she could kiss him there.

Then she stiffened and turned toward the River Styx. Her people were known for their passions in love and war, but not for their sense of family. Nevertheless, they were fiercely loyal, and she had been ingrained with that loyalty all of her life.

Arthur saw her alarm and then his eyes mirrored her own concern. He sat up painfully, and they rose side by side.

"Danny?" he said.

Ceridwen shook her head. "I… I didn’t see him. I could only think of you, and… the river let me find you. Gull did something, but… I’m not even sure if I could — "

Then she was moving, running toward the water’s edge. She had to try at least to locate Danny Ferrick. The boy had sacrificed himself trying to save them. Ceridwen could do no less if there was a chance he might still be alive.

"Ceri, wait!" Arthur shouted. She turned to see him pointing back up the river. "Look!"

Out on the rushing river a section of the water was white with the undulations beneath. She had no time to act before the Styx erupted and the sea monster, Scylla, shot up from its flow, letting loose with a shriek that caused her to clap her hands over her ears and stagger backward. It swayed and rocked in the air, shaking and continuing to shriek as its heads swung about.

Then it spotted Ceridwen and Arthur on the bank. It reared up, whipping back and forth in a frenzy, maddened with rage.

Arthur came up beside her and raised his hands. Ceridwen lifted her staff, but she knew that they were both depleted. She wondered if they would be able to summon enough energy to destroy the monstrosity.

One final time Scylla shrieked.

Its belly swelled, inflating quickly. The thing’s jaws opened but this time its scream was of silent agony. Scylla’s flesh tore, ripped open from within, and a gore-covered figure emerged from its viscera.

Danny Ferrick leaped into the river and hit the water with a splash only seconds before Scylla toppled in after him. Unmoving, the giant beast floated half above and half below the water, and the current began to drag it away.

When Danny climbed from the water, Ceridwen and Arthur ran to him. He was hunched over, unsmiling, horns gleaming wet, and his eyes glowed a perilous red. The boy had never looked more like a demon. There was so much of Hell in his eyes that they stopped a few steps away, regarding him warily.

"Oh, man," Danny said, shaking his head and then reaching up to cover his face. "That just totally sucked."

Ceridwen smiled and went to him, pulling him into her embrace.

"Thank you," she said.

Danny shrugged, wildness in his eyes. "Any time. This is why we’re here, right? All in all, I’d rather be watching TV. But if we don’t do the dirty work, there won’t be any TV. So, I figure, we do what we’ve gotta do."

Arthur clapped a hand on the boy’s shoulder, a bemused smile on his face. "So, you’re fighting monsters and traversing the netherworld to make the world safe for television?"

"Pretty much."

"Well," Conan Doyle said, "as long as you have your priorities straight."

Their time in the Underworld had been a parade of the astonishing, a mind-boggling series of sights and experiences unlike any they had previously experienced. Conan Doyle had come to believe he had grown numb to it, that there was nothing left that could surprise him. Now, standing on a hill of bones, gazing down on the sprawling corpse of Hades, the mage realized how wrong he had been.

"Y’know what?" Danny asked beside him, breathing through his mouth to avoid the horrendous stench of decay that permeated the air. "I’ve had enough. I’m going home."

Ceridwen moved up next to the boy and placed a comforting arm about his shoulders. Conan Doyle knew the Fey were sensitive to the emotional states of others. She could feel Danny’s turmoil and was attempting to calm him. That was good, for he himself had no time for such mollycoddling. One of his Menagerie was in grave danger, and he would move Heaven, Earth and the Underworld itself to get her back.