by Vivian Shaw
Greta wanted to ask questions, a lot of them, but she could not seem to organize the words into coherent sentences; her mind felt like a cauldron full of poisoned soup, chunks of thought swirling and bobbing chaotically in an unpleasant murk. She was still trying to figure out what she wanted to ask first when Mewleep, now accompanied by the ghoullet and his mother, took her wrist in a clawed hand and led her around the bulk of Ruthven’s furnace to the low, dark mouth of a tunnel. He fished out a piece of what looked like rotting wood from a pouch hanging on his belt. It glowed a thoroughly unearthly green, giving off enough light to show her the tunnel’s walls. Blocks of stone and bricks had been set in neat piles around the opening. It had clearly been carefully bricked up, and only recently reopened.
The last thing she saw, looking over her shoulder, was the pitifully small band of ghouls starting up the cellar steps to whatever awaited them beyond.
Greta had to walk bent over, shuffling along under the low tunnel roof. It was completely black except for the green ghost-light and the dim red pinpoints of the ghouls’ eyes. She followed Mewleep in silence, still dazed by the shock of the fire and the way Halethorpe had seemed to be able to see again, sit up on his own, as if the strength of the dying had come back to him all at once; the force of his words, as if a whole lifetime of effort were behind each one.
He’s dead, she thought. He’s almost certainly dead.
And, after a moment, It’s better this way.
His injuries and infections had been so massive, so comprehensive, that she knew even with the best of care he would not have had much time, and the questions that would have been raised at the hospital were questions that inevitably led to discoveries better left undiscovered. And she thought perhaps it was better for him, that he should go out this way, facing the people he had once fought alongside, rather than sinking slowly little by little.
He should have had the consolation of the last rites, should have had that reassurance, before he went, but maybe that didn’t matter; maybe he would not need to be given absolution after all, maybe he had bought and paid for it himself in the end. Greta would have cried for him, if she had been able to form tears. They seemed to have gone dry.
The tunnel opened out into a larger passageway, the roof only just high enough for Greta to walk upright. As the immediate urgency of escape faded, sour, spent adrenaline throbbed in her head, and she couldn’t help thinking of Ruthven’s lovely house burning to the ground with Halethorpe inside it, and wondered where the others were. And what they would think if—no, when, damn it—when they made their way back up to the surface to find the house a smoking ruin containing a human skeleton. Ruthven had left her in charge, entrusted it to her, and hadn’t she done just a bang-up job of protecting his possessions?
Anna was badly hurt because of me, she thought again. She could have been killed, and Ruthven’s house is dying.
The haze of misery blotted out constructive thought. It was only when Mewleep paused to let the other ghoul, Akha, catch up, the pallid glow of foxfire catching the planes and angles of his face, that she remembered Kree-akh standing in Ruthven’s cellar talking to him. Tell Dr. Helsing what you have seen.
That thought helped. Greta’s vague and unhelpful mental processes seemed finally to cohere into something approaching constructive reasoning. “Mewleep,” she said. “What did you mean, blue fire?”
CHAPTER 14
Mewleep’s English was significantly less fluent than his father’s, but nonetheless Greta could piece it together without much difficulty, standing in the darkness and listening to the story he told.
The ghouls knew almost every corner of the undercity, from the sewers to the subway to the old Pneumatic Dispatch conduits to the miles and miles of 150-year-old utility tunnels that crisscrossed the metropolis. They were very, very good at practicing the art of not being seen by the humans who regularly visited these underground spaces. They had to be. And they had very sharp ears and eyes.
He had been hunting for fresh rat for Akha’s baby—ghouls didn’t like fresh meat, exactly, preferring it to have gone a little runny first, but at least a live healthy rat was less likely to contain poison than a dead one—in the Northern tube line near Belsize Park station, and had heard men’s voices coming not from the station platform itself but under it. Voices filtering up through the ground.
Mewleep had known there were some deeper tunnels dug beneath the Underground here and there, but they were mostly shut up very firmly, bricked up sometimes, and there was too much man-smelling stuff in there—and not enough rats—for the deep tunnels to be considered as potential haunts. This one had people in it, however, and he was curious. He had made his way down through a tangle of ventilation ducts until he could see into the old shut-up, rusty-walled tunnel below.
He had never seen the lights on in one of these places before. Ghouls could see in the dark very well indeed, but the humans went blind almost immediately without these bright stinging lights. There were two humans in there, talking to each other, but what Mewleep saw beyond them was much more interesting.
“Blue fire,” he told Greta. “Blue fire in a … flask? A bottle. Lectristy.”
Beside him Akha hunched her shoulders and held the baby closer. She was shivering. “Lectristy,” she repeated in a hiss, emphasis on the first syllable, as if it were the name of some terrible enemy or a deadly disease.
“Fire in a bottle,” Greta said, intensely focused. “In a bottle about so high, with legs sticking off the bottom of it?”
Mewleep nodded. “We see it before,” he said. “Blue fire underground, lectristy, we see it before, all my father’s tribe, it kills two of us when they touch a thing in a tunnel that they should not touch, blue fire leaps at them and they dance and they are burned and they are dead.”
“Fear it,” Akha rasped. “Ware it.”
“But here the fire is caught in a bottle,” Mewleep said. “In a bottle, and it does not leap at the humans, and they do not ware it, like there is nothing to fear. It is sorcery.”
“It’s electromagnetism,” said Greta, feeling dizzy, thinking of Fastitocalon explaining parallels. “That … thing you saw. It’s not the only one under the city. There is at least one other, and that one is sorcery, all right, it’s … what’s behind everything, all the murders, all the raids on your people. That’s where Ruthven and the others have gone. To break it. To end it.”
Akha was shaking her head, holding the baby tighter; he began to cry softly. “No,” she said, and then went into a rapid-fire crackle and hack of ghoulish. Mewleep listened.
“She says, they break the bottle and let out the fire, and everyone will dance and burn,” he translated. Greta sighed.
“I can see why you’d think that,” she said, “but it’s—it can’t live outside its bottle. It won’t escape and kill anyone, it’ll just go out, like a blown candle, and stop … being dangerous, except the whole mercury contamination angle, which I am not going to think about right now. They have to shut it down, or break it, either way.”
“Shut it down?” Mewleep said.
“Yes. It has to stop.”
“Kill power,” he said, as if to make sure.
“Yes. That. Shut it down, turn it off, kill the power, throw the goddamn switch, whatever phrasing you like,” she said, and heard her voice rising, and hated it.
“I know how.”
In the dim light of the rotting wood he held, Greta could not make out his expression as clearly as she would like. “You do?” she said.
“The humans in the tunnel are talking,” he said. “I do not listen at first but then one says kill, and then I am listening hard. They are talking about power. They are talking about a box and a switch that kills, and where this box is found, outside the tunnels.”
Greta stared at him. If Ruthven had been right and the shelters were all laid out close to the same way—Why hadn’t they thought of that, God, they didn’t have to go walking right into the thing’s lair armed
only with a cavalry saber and a couple of silk veils, it—
“Do you remember—” she began, and didn’t have to finish. He nodded.
“I listen,” he said. “I listen very well, Dr. Helsing. I am hearing everything they say, and I remember.”
“We have to get to the St. Paul’s tube station,” she said. “That’s where it is. Underneath. If it’s the same kind of shelter the switch will probably be in the same place. Can you take me there, Mewleep? Can you take me there right now?”
Fastitocalon stood very still in the shadows of a shop doorway on Newgate Street, not seeing the familiar pavement beneath his feet at all. In his rather more complicated vision the surface of the street was merely a translucent intimation, a line drawn on a layered diagram. He could see the lift shaft with its staircase coiling down into the dark, and the peculiar vertically stacked platforms of St. Paul’s station proper, and below that—
Below that was a tangled pulsing knot of brilliant blue, staining and filling up the bores of the abandoned shelter complex. The comings and goings of the blue monks were recorded in their looping and returning traces, like the tracks of animals, and Fastitocalon could see where they had crept from tunnel system to tunnel system on their deadly errands, moving under the city with a kind of blind, insectile determination. The blue trails converged on the throbbing heart of the glow, where whatever it was that had done this to them—to the mad monks, to the murder victims, to Varney and Greta and God knew who else—lay waiting.
He did not think it was aware of them, just yet. He was putting out quite a lot of energy into holding a shield around Varney and Cranswell and Ruthven as they crept down the turns of the staircase, and there was nothing in the pulsing light that indicated it knew he was there. Fastitocalon knew better than to hope, but he had been dwelling here on the skin of the world for a long, long time, and some human habits were hard to break.
He could see, too, the blue points of the two monks still present in the shelter tunnels. When the others had reached almost the bottom of the staircase and stopped to wait for his signal, Fastitocalon took a deep, painful breath—everything hurt now; he was running on empty and he still had so much to do—and focused on the two blue points.
A moment later there was a muffled bang like a car backfiring, as the air where Fastitocalon had been collapsed suddenly in on itself.
He found himself surrounded by a dank, chilly blackness, the dense lightless atmosphere of places under the earth. Not that he needed light to see any more than the Gladius Sancti did. To him the tunnel in which he stood was a transparent outline on a kind of moving blueprint.
He was quite aware that the two monks, who had frozen at the sudden disturbance of his arrival, were now approaching him with their crossblades drawn and ready, and he let them get quite close before he changed.
Through all the centuries he had spent on earth, Fastitocalon had looked very much the same from age to age, grey-pale, fiftyish, respectable, unremarkable. Human. Now he very deliberately took that seeming off and the blackness of the tunnel was suddenly lit with moving, flickering orange light.
The wings felt strange, after so long without them. In fact the whole form felt strange—not unpleasant, simply unfamiliar. Fastitocalon, now not even remotely mistakable for a middle-aged human accountant, floated a few inches off the floor and spread his wings as far as they would go, filling the tunnel bore from side to side.
The wings of demons, contrary to supposition, can look like pretty much anything the owner wants them to. Leathery and batlike had of course been in vogue on and off forever, and some people went in for complicated hymenopteran versions with lots of little iridescent veins, but Fastitocalon’s were the same white as they had been since the flames of Lake Avernus bleached their color away all those ages ago, the morning of the Fall. The feathers were a little tatty, perhaps. In need of a good preen. Mostly the flickering orange light that limned each one of them hid the wear.
The two monks had frozen as soon as the light show had started up, and were staring at him. Their eyes were blank, a boiled-egg white behind the blue glow, like Halethorpe’s had been, and Fastitocalon could remember very clearly saying, Your soul’s intact. I’m looking right at it.
He was looking right at theirs now, and there was something there inside, tangled and overgrown with mad buzzing blue.
“Angel,” one of them whispered. The blades were drooping forgotten in their hands.
This might actually work, thought Fastitocalon, doing his best to smile. And then reached hard, hard into both their minds, sank his grip into the lashing blue tendrils wrapped around each, and pulled.
He could feel the others nearby, and as he pulled, he shouted at the top of his mental voice, NOW!
It was loud enough to make all three of them jump, though none of them had heard a sound. Ruthven looked from Cranswell to Varney, apparently making some final decision of his own, and nodded, and together they plunged down the last curve of the spiral staircase and into the light.
Into the light. The blue light. Finally into the play of the cold-burning glow under the city, the light that killed germs, burned skin, spoke words into the minds and hearts of men and changed them into something no longer entirely human.
Cranswell had time to realize that it hadn’t been expecting them, that Fastitocalon’s shielding had worked; that they had come as a surprise to it, and that it did not like surprises. Then the others hunched away, shielding their eyes from its brilliance, and the light fell full on Cranswell’s face, and thought went away entirely.
He stood transfixed while the light poured through him, through his heart, through his head. Instead of the warm redness of Ruthven’s reassurance his mind was flooded with a wave of bright, cold blue. Sensation dwindled; he lost everything except the hum and the blueness and the dancing spark at the heart of the glow.
It was huge, bigger than he had imagined, the heavy glass bulb with its angled legs almost three feet tall from the base to the top of the dome, clamped within its metal cabinet. The hum it made filled all the world, filled up the spaces in the bones of his head, resonated in the roots of his teeth, sent ripples through the clear jelly of his eyes.
He took a step farther, and then another step, into the glow. He could understand the blue monks now, understand their … passion. Their adoration.
Then hands like iron closed around his shoulders, and he was wrenched around to stare into a pair of eyes that even through the silk veiling looked like polished metal balls. Varney’s teeth were bared, very sharp and very long and very white, and something deep in Cranswell’s brain responded with a pulse of deep and primitive fear that seemed somehow to drive away a little of the blue fog. “Hold,” Varney said, or rather snarled. The sweetness was entirely gone from his voice, leaving only command. “Cranswell, you hold, do you understand me?”
“So beautiful,” he heard himself say. His mind felt full of shattered ice and quicksand, all sharp edges and dull helpless sliding at once, poisoned with blue, drunk with it.
“August Cranswell, you know damn well that thing’s a jumped-up lightbulb, nothing more than a bit of engineering with ideas above its station,” Varney said, and there was the sweetness, the mellifluous beauty back again, and instead of warm pink clouds Cranswell found himself abruptly in a place with mirrored walls. It was like cool glass against burning skin, better than Ruthven’s thrall, better than the bright shock of adrenaline.
In the mirrors he could see more clearly, see the rectifier for what it was, and hear the voice in which it spoke without—quite—falling all the way under its spell. “You have to do it,” Varney said, echoing in the halls of his mind. Behind them Ruthven had staggered all the way back to the doorway, hiding his face. Even over the thing’s hum Cranswell could hear him gasping. “I can’t get close enough on my own,” the vampyre said, “and he can hardly stand. It has to be you, Cranswell. Can you do it?”
He blinked, his eyes stinging—the stink of ozone in h
ere was so strong it took the breath away—and felt for the hilt of the saber.
I have to, he thought. There isn’t any choice. I must, so I can. “Yes,” he said out loud, and Varney squeezed his shoulders hard enough to bruise.
He could see blisters rising on Varney’s face through the silk, felt his own skin burning. Thought of the man they had left behind in Ruthven’s house, who had spent hours, perhaps, in vigil, kneeling within inches of this thing. Thought of the uncertain wavering voice, reciting bits of scripture cut and pasted like ransom note letters into a set of new and hideous commandments.
For wickedness is in their dwellings, he thought, and among them.
He turned from Varney, back toward the moving core of the light in its glass castle, the hilt of Ruthven’s dining room saber blood-warm in his hand.
They were schoolboys. In Fastitocalon’s mind the edges of both monks’ memories were vivid, clear, even through the writhing poison-blue of the foreign influence. One of them was barely nineteen, the other in his early twenties. Both had wanted very much to be priests. To serve God. To do right.
He held on grimly, pulling against the blue glow, feeling the adhesions between human and inhuman beginning to tear. Fastitocalon had watched Stephen Halethorpe do this on his own, wounded and sick and at the end of his strength, and now that he himself was having to try to separate two relatively healthy individuals from the clinging, questing tendrils of whatever was behind all this misery, he was astonished that Halethorpe had managed it at all. That he had somehow even found the determination to try.
That Halethorpe was dead Fastitocalon had known for some little time now. He had felt that particular point of light wink out of his mental awareness of the city. The others were okay—or not okay; he didn’t at all like how bad Ruthven’s signature felt—but there. Cranswell, Varney. Greta.