by John Shirley
Balf scratched at his groin thoughtfully. “Iain Culley, the one some call the Gloomlord, found his way here through some magical means; it is said he used the power of a great elemental to bring him to the Underlands. Above, he was thought a heretic, and believed they’d burn him if he stayed. Here he found a people to overpower: an old Roman settlement, sunk down in a great upheaval of the mother’s skin long, long ago. There were survivors of that quaking in this corner of the Underland, whom we call the Fallen Romans. These he enslaved with his magic, and his control over the harpies and the gripplers. He designed his palace to be like those he saw somewhere in the surface world, and he made the Fallen Romans build it.”
“And he makes you keep his machine in good repair?”
“He did—there were others too, but they are dead now. They lost heart and refused to eat. I am the only surviving Azki in this place.”
“You talk about revenge,” Geoff put in, “But it sounds risky, mate. I mean, you’re big, but if he has an army . . .”
“Enough men could destroy me, it’s true,” Balf admitted grudgingly. “Two or three score might succeed in destroying me. A score of harpies might be enough to kill me, perhaps. Fewer if they catch me napping.”
“What’s this machinery all about, Balf?” Geoff asked, pointing at the curved wall behind them. It rumbled endlessly with the torquing of the enormous axle rising from the deep darkness below.
“Why, that is the power that drives the engines of the Palace of Phosphor, and the metropolis the King Underneath calls Danque. But more importantly, it provides the energies which are drawn into the loom of life with which the King reanimates himself upon awakening each day—for the King has arranged a sequence of day and night in his realm. Without this reanimation, human mortality will return to him and quickly. Immortality which is stolen, and neither natural nor’earned, comes at great cost. The cost is great power and the suffering of thousands, all for the life of one man. I have brooded over this for centuries.”
“What do they use to power the machine down below?” Geoff asked.
“They use you, Geoff,” Constantine said. “Or they would have. They use hapless blokes like you. If I hadn’t pulled you out of there, they’d have fed you to a grippler, then put you to work. If you’d shirked, or complained, you’d have become food.”
“Fed me to a grippler—and then put me to work? Makes no sense.”
“You don’t want to know, mate. The grippler doesn’t eat you, it works some kind of mold into you, to change you into a meat machine, like, that turns the wheels, works for centuries, and loses all track of time . . . stops caring about anything but his next meal. If he’s not the next meal himself, that is.”
“But they’re deep underground; you’d think they could use geothermal energy, you know, instead of turning bloody wheels for chris’sakes . . .”
“I do not know this gee-oh-ther-mall,” Balf said, “but the power of the machine must come from human beings, subjected to suffering, complying mindlessly. This is the alchemy of King Culley; it is part of the magic. The formula requires the slow wasting of human souls, and this gives satisfaction to the demons who eke out the force by which the Gloomlord lives. The power draws on the strength of lightning—”
“It’s electrical?” Geoff asked.
“If that is what lightning is, then yes. But that is not enough. It must be fused with the sacrifice of the mindless, toiling in darkness.”
“That’s what I call alternative energy, eh?” Constantine commented. He drew deeply on his cigarette, so it burned quickly to the butt, and stubbed it out on the floor, adding musingly, “The sacrifice of the mindless, toiling in the darkness. Really is like our own economy back ’ome.” Scratching his stubbly cheek, Constantine turned to Balf. “You hear something about the King Underneath having a plan to poison the ocean?”
“The ocean? We are far from there. I know nothing of such a plan. But I have not been away from the machine for many years. They tell me nothing.”
“John,” Geoff said, “we should be off, shouldn’t we? Won’t the gripplers come looking for us?”
“Right enough they will, boy. But there are things we need to find out. Balf, old sport, who is this Gloomlord geezer exactly? I mean, originally. You said his name was Culley?”
“Iain Culley—a man who was born back more than four hundred turns around Sol. He was a student long ago, of another mortal named Fludd . . . this is all I know, though he became an alchemist, and a magician, who fled to the Underlands to escape the persecution of his fellows, and used his power to make himself mighty.”
“Flood, you say . . . Hang on—Fludd? Not Robert Fludd? The Renaissance alchemist?”
“This word, Renn-ay-sonz I have not heard, but perhaps this Fludd is the same man.”
“Blimey—that opens some doors.”
“John!” Geoff said urgently. “We’d best hurry out of here!”
“Right. Balf, old chap, what else can you show me of this great huge machine of yours?”
“Much! Come with me . . . We must ascend.”
Geoff looked at him with renewed interest. “Ascend? As in to the surface? As in get the hell out of these bloody caves?”
“I cannot take you there, not yet. Our ascent will only be to the next level of this machine. This way! Ten paces and around this corner, a passage opens!”
~
“Granddad, they’re pulling someone else up from the village!”
“So they are, Boswell. Oh, God forgive them—it’s the vicar!”
They watched in horror as Tombridge, dangling by an ankle a hundred feet below the crack in the ceiling, was pulled up from the village, alternating between wailing and hysterically praying as he came.
Bosky and Garth were flattened on a crag at one end of the crack in the ceiling of the huge cavern that had swallowed up the village. They had crawled up to the crag to where they could see but still be out of sight of the demonic creatures that undulated humpingly along like gigantic, gray, eyeless sea-elephants farther along the shelves, at the top of the zigzagging crevice. One of them was unnervingly close, on a shelf of rock about a hundred feet away. It was occupied just now in sending its long sinuous feelers, with four-fingered hands on the ends, into holes in the rock behind it.
The grippler—as the stranger at the barrow had called them—lifted the vicar to its wide, oozing slash of a mouth.
“Oh my sweet lord, it’s going to eat him!” Garth gasped.
Vicar Tombridge did indeed vanish into the big lipless maw of the grippler and it seemed to chew. Bosky had to look away, stomach lurching. Should he try to shoot the thing? But surely it was too late to save the vicar now, and he wasn’t such a good shot he could be sure of hitting even so big a thing as the blob-like demon from here. And a gunshot would alert the creatures to him and Granddad. Already he was worried, seeing the harpies circling back and forth between their crack and the village. If one of them should notice Bosky and his granddad up here, they’d attack—and with the tentacular demons to worry about, too, the odds didn’t seem good.
“Cor and blimey, it’s letting him out!” Garth said, jabbing Bosky with an elbow.
It was true—the grippler was pulling the vicar out like a man pulling a bone from his mouth, only in this case the meat hadn’t been stripped away, only the vicar’s clothing, which the beast seemed to chew thoughtfully, like chewing tobacco, as the still-living Tombridge was set onto a path above the crack nearby. He stood there, swaying, covered with a gray slime. Then he began walking listlessly toward the edge, apparently planning to throw himself off. But that’s when one of the harpies flew up and snatched him from the rock, carrying him with its talons on his upper arms toward a tunnel at the other side of the cavern.
“You see that, Granddad? The harpy’s taking him to the tunnel, over there! There’s a ledge like the one where we got in the fight with them!”
“And . . . and what do you reckon that means, Bosky?” Garth asked, wor
riedly.
“Just that we’ve got to go there!”
Garth sighed. “I was afraid you’d say that.”
“That’s where they must have taken Geoff! And look, there’s places to clamber along over the shelves with those blobby devils on them! We can pass above them and get to the far side of the crack! Then we’ll look for a passage to wherever Geoff is . . .”
“Bosky, my dear lad, has it not occurred to you that your friend is certainly dead?”
“The vicar’s still alive, ain’t he? You could see him kicking as that harpy bitch carried him off. Maybe they’re basting them to eat later, I don’t know. But I’ve got to find out!”
Garth allowed himself only one more weary sigh. “Very well. But let’s us be quiet as ever we can be.”
They got up, Bosky being careful not to knock the rifle against stone, afraid of the sound it would make. They traversed the irregular path above the shelves at the bottom of the crack, edging carefully along, fearful that they might dislodge a pebble onto one of the demons. They were partly hidden by the mist that clung up here and by the dimness within the crack, set back from the cavern’s phosphorescent illumination.
Toiling carefully along, having to climb as much as walk, it seemed to take forever; but at last they had gotten nearly to the tunnel at the other side of the ceiling over the cavern, and were within fifteen paces of entering it . . .
. . . when Bosky felt an inexorable grip fasten around his ankle. He looked back to reproach Granddad, who he supposed was trying to help him climb and was holding him back more than helping. Only it wasn’t Granddad grabbing his ankle, it was the gray hand of a grippler, its long, long arm stretching back to the humped body on the shelf below. It pulled Bosky off his feet, hard onto his belly, the stone knocking the rifle from his grip. It clattered, rolled, and stuck between two boulders nearby.
Granddad was fishing in his pocket, cursing himself in a mutter, “Goddamn you, Garth, you old fool, find it!”
“Granddad! Get the rifle!” But by the time Garth climbed down to the rifle it would be too late. The demon was dragging him faster now—soon he would fall off the crag and onto the shelf, to be sucked into the grippler’s drooling mouth. He held on to a boulder, tried to pull free from the grippler, and for a full second he managed to hold on, and the arm quivered, as if frustrated. Then it gave a heave and Bosky was pulled loose from his hold, his palms scraping on the stone.
“Granddad!”
Garth was there, crouching on a flat rock beside the grippler’s arm, opening the pocketknife he’d brought along, the blade the Lady of Waters had blessed, even as another hand from the same grippler was rising like the head of a sea serpent to poise over him, fingers opening like the serpent’s jaws . . .
“Granddad look out, it’s right over you!” Bosky yelled as he was dragged closer to the edge of the precipice.
Garth was sawing at the arm now, and the blade, shimmering with enchantment, was cutting through it, releasing the mercury-like ooze that passed for the grippler’s blood.
Then the arm parted with a twang and Bosky jumped up, kicking the loosening hand away, and climbed hastily to the rifle. It took about thirty seconds to reach it and when he pulled it from the crevice and turned he saw Garth straining against the grippler’s other hand, trying to cut at the arm, but the thing’s wrist was behind his neck and he couldn’t quite reach it.
“Bosky . . . run!” Garth rasped. “Just run!”
Bosky fitted the rifle butt into the hollow of his shoulder, aimed down at the grippler’s body, and fired. The bullet went home, and the gelatinous creature contracted away from the wound, wriggling and twitching, hissing to itself, as Bosky cocked the rifle and fired again.
“Let go!” he shouted. “Or you’ll get a third one!”
It seemed to understand the threat in his voice if not the words and it let go of Granddad’s neck. Garth fell forward over a rock, wheezing for air.
The injured grippler was compressing, squeezing within itself, getting smaller and smaller, oozing a blue smoke from its wounds . . . before exploding like a fungal pod, leaving only tatters and two long, limp arms.
But the other gripplers were aware of them now, stretching their feelers out toward Bosky and Garth, and the harpies were beating their wings at the air, climbing to get at them, screaming as they came.
“Come on, boy!” Garth rasped.
Bosky chambered another round and fired from about thirty feet away at a harpy. The bullet caught the harpy in the breast and it shrieked hideously, its eyes revealing, for a split second, the terrible knowledge of its approaching death, and Bosky felt a regret, reflecting that he was killing a creature that was older than civilization, a creature from the times of ancient heroes—a being which, perhaps, had laid eyes on the likes of Jason and Ulysses. For Bosky now believed those men had existed. He was ready to believe a great many things he’d scoffed at before.
The harpy tumbled away and Bosky turned and followed Garth up onto the thin, wending path. A few steps more and they jumped down onto a flat ledge that led to the opening of a tunnel into the wall of the greater cavern. They dashed inside, with another grippler’s fingers probing at the stone where they’d stood moments before.
~
“My hair’s standing on end,” Geoff said.
“No need to be scared,” Constantine said. Adding lightly, “Except, of course, of almost every bloody thing down here.”
“I’m not scared; it’s literally standing on end.”
Constantine realized his hair was standing up too, even more than usual. “I see what you mean, Geoff; my hair’s all at attention as well. You’re looking like a bloody 1980s rock star, your hair like that.”
They were feeling the powerful electrical field given off by the arcs of lightning between the curiously warped electrodes, five of them, just where the points of a pentagram would be—a pentagram three hundred feet in diameter—around the gigantic central column of the torquing shaft that emerged into the chamber from far below. Eventually the same axle connected, far below, to the cranks that were turned by the crankers like the late Arfur, trapped forever in the bottommost chamber of the Sunless Realm.
Geoff, Balf, and Constantine—Balf looming over both of them—stood on a leather-covered iron balcony high up on a wall overlooking the “alchemical transfusion chamber,” as Balf called it: a bubble-shaped separate cavern above Balf’s domicile. The silver-coated struts that ran to the electrodes from the central shaft whipped around and around, turning between each crackling, eye-searing discharge of purple lightning. Crackle, roar—and then the five struts, like vanes on an umbrella, would spin each to the next electrode. Crackle, roar—spin. The whole construction was about two hundred fifty feet high and one hundred fifty across. Now and then Constantine seemed to glimpse big lumbering spectral figures in the darkness between the electrodes.
“There’s power in the air here, Balf,” Constantine observed. “If this is the source of the King’s power, why don’t we just pop in there and, I don’t know, fling a wrench in the works? We could have this whole expedition over, bob’s your uncle, in no time and I’m out of this hell hole and looking for a likely pub.”
“You do not see the guardian demons? The Il-Sorgs are there. Look close, when the lightning flashes, and you may glimpse them.”
“Oh. Them? The big chaps with the tusks? They don’t look so tough; you could take them.”
“I’m afraid I could not, as you say, ‘take them.’ ”
Constantine looked closer. Then he nodded. Difficult to make out what they looked like—creatures thirty feet high, made of some astral material; they were bipeds, with great up-curving tusks, resembling the guardian demons seen on temples in the Far East. It was hard to get an astrotaxological fix on them, for they flickered in and out of visibility and for the most part weren’t visible at all. But that didn’t mean they weren’t dangerous.
“Right. They look like what my American friends would cal
l major assholes. But isn’t there a way to get past the bastards?”
“This machine provides the kind the energy that sustains him, and gives him magical vitality, but the source of his sorcerous control over the kingdom is said to be elsewhere. In a certain chamber in the palace, locked away, there resides a powerful being, trapped, whose magic the King uses to give him power over the gripplers and the harpies. Were that being released, the Il-Sorg would be released in turn, and the machine could be stopped. With the machine stopped, the King’s power would diminish, his vitality draining . . . and his minions would scatter.”
Constantine snorted in disgust. “Never simple, is it? Just once I’d like to shoot some bastard in the head or throw one fucking switch and get it all over with. Well let’s do this right. A botch job won’t do. And MacCrawley’s involved somehow; got to get him out of the way. Right. Here’s the plan, then, Balf, if you’re of a mind to trust me . . .”
They spoke for a good ten minutes, and then Balf escorted Geoff and Constantine to a staircase that angled upward along the wall of a great high-ceilinged gallery. Balf led the way, taking three steps for each one of theirs, waiting patiently on the topmost landing—he had learned patience over half a millennium—till they at last arrived, puffing, at a height Constantine estimated to be some three hundred yards above the floor. Here stood two towering doors, each made of bands of iron framing blocks of black stone. The portal was about eighty feet high, the doors weighing countless tons, their stone panels figured with threatening images of harpies, trolls, and skull-faced soldiers, above which was emblazoned the head of a cadaverous man wearing a five-pointed crown.
“It is well I am here,” Balf said. “For you would never be able to open these doors alone.”
Balf reached into a pocket of his robe, took out the crystals he had used earlier, and tapped them on the door in carefully selected spots. The crystals vibrated, and a fulsome clicking came responsively from within the metal portals. “It is done: they are unlocked. I will push them open and retreat below. You know how to call me.” So saying, he passed Constantine two of the crystals, which the magician put in his trench coat pocket.