by John Shirley
They were both outdoors and indoors: on the top of a wall, outside the buildings, but within the cavern. Hundreds of yards overhead was the blue-glowing ceiling, like the one over the village, though this cavern was even bigger. As Constantine watched, it grew darker, the light source increasingly obscured by a gathering of dark clouds covering the ceiling. The swift movement of the clouds and their unnatural thickness suggested magic at work.
“It’s getting darker,” Geoff observed, a catch in his voice revealing his growing fear.
“I reckon the King Beneath, as Scofield called him, likes a day and night cycle to try and keep a sense of time,” Constantine theorized. “He’s got a spell going to make those clouds gather this time of day. It’d be just sunset up above.”
As the cavern grew darker, the palace’s own inner glow, barely visible before, now pulsed eerily into prominence, making it seem to shine with the potency of the King Underneath. It would have a powerful psychological effect on his subjects, Constantine supposed, living literally in its shadow.
They reached the end of the wall and were herded down a staircase to a courtyard. There were horses here, tethered to iron rings in the walls of wood-and-stone barracks—white, eyeless horses with enormous legs, short backs, and tusks like those of boars.
“Them horses have got no eyes!” Geoff blurted.
Constantine looked at him, suspecting the boy had been through too much and was about to panic. He squeezed Geoff’s elbow hard. “Keep your wits about you, Geoff,” he whispered, “and we’ll get you out of this to the upper world, I promise you!”
The boy nodded, chewing his lower lip, and Constantine silently asked himself: Should you be making promises you can’t keep to people who matter?
They entered the great central building of the palace through a side door and found themselves in a low hall that seemed in a sad state of decay. There were Gothic and early-Renaissance decorations on the wall, often framing murals showing alchemical signs, representations of alchemical vessels, and runic invocations to power. But most of these were difficult to see, streaked with mildew, peeling away. The occasional article of furniture was leaning, skewed, splintery. The light came from the walls themselves, and in some passages from strips in the floor, intermittently pulsing crystalline panels. Since they pulsed at different rates, enough were illuminated at any given moment that the light never completely failed, but the effect was of a sputtering power source. The palace’s air smelled of incense, mold, cooked meat and, faintly, of rot.
Up ahead two sagging doors, flanked by sullen, bored skull-faced guards leaning on their pikes, opened onto the throne room. The prisoners were hustled into the throne room, where a clutch of other prisoners waited—watched by a lazing circle of guards—in the center of the throne room’s polished black-marble floor. The two thrones on a dais at one end of the glittering high-ceilinged room were empty. It appeared they awaited the pleasure of the King. The general impression given out by the room was of a gigantic music-box, tackily ornate, with gems studding the columns along the walls; golden traceries on the walls set off panels painted with fantastic images of a kingly figure wearing a five-pointed crown, standing with his foot on the neck of a troll—resembling Balf but fiercer-looking—like St. George about to slay the dragon.
Constantine turned his attention to the other prisoners, one of whom was glowering angrily at him. Two of the prisoners seemed to be ragged, pallid men from the settlement below the palace, presumably miscreants who’d transgressed some local law; the other two were captives from the surface, if captives they were. One of them was MacCrawley, the source of the baleful glower. The other, Constantine didn’t know—a tweedy, balding little man whose expression alternated between muted terror and an attempt at magisterial snootiness.
But as they were chivvied to stand with the other prisoners, Geoff identified the stranger with a whisper. “That’s Lord Smithson, from the manor by the village! Owns more than half of Tonsell!”
“His property value has gone down, then,” Constantine observed dryly. Adding more loudly, for MacCrawley’s benefit—for Constantine’s old enemy was standing just a few steps away—“Lovely room, in a kitschy kind of way, to be held prisoner in, eh MacCrawley?”
“Bah! Go the devil, Constantine! For good this time! I’m no prisoner here. I have been summoned to an audience with His Majesty! King Culley and I are old friends!”
“I had ‘an audience’ with a copper, not long ago,” Constantine said. “Had to spend the night in the drunk tank. Threw up my supper. Thought of you about then, mate, as I was looking at the upchuck. And here you are! Funny old world, innit?”
“Maneo captivus!” the Captain of the guards ordered them. Wait here, prisoners!
And the darkness thickened in the chilly realm of the Gloomlord.
8
THE NIGHT HAS A THOUSAND EYES
The sickly, pretty lady with the blond, elaborately coiffed hair had been at work over Maureen for several minutes, cleaning the wound over her breast, washing and bandaging it, humming to herself all the while, before Maureen really came to herself on the silk cushions of the gloomy but lavish room.
“Oh . . . where am I?” Maureen asked, feeling quite unreal. The air smelled of incense and the light seemed to pulse, to mute, to intensify and then, after a few moments, to go dull again.
“Here, put on this little dress, hon,” said the woman, helping Maureen to sit up. She handed Maureen a dress of blue silk, with a plunging neckline but an ankle-length skirt. “You’re in the queen’s quarters. I’m the queen, by the way. Queen Megan. I’m, like, nursing you back to health so you can be hella grateful to me and be my servant and my friend and my lady in waiting and, y’know, all that! I asked the King to have a maidservant selected for me from that village they brought down, and you’re it, I guess.”
“You—you sound like you have an . . . American accent . . .” Maureen said, rubbing her head, still feeling dizzy. But she put on the dress, wincing with pain when she slipped her arms into the sleeves. She had sense enough to know she was lucky to be alive, and if she wanted to stay that way she’d better do what she could to make her new “employers” happy.
“America! Don’t mention America; the King totally doesn’t like it! He doesn’t like people to talk about the upper world, even though he’s, like, always obsessing about it himself, the old hypocrite. But yeah I’m . . . from there. I was, anyhow, a few years ago. I don’t fucking know how long, it’s hard to keep track of time here. No calendars, and the only holiday is Gratitude to the King Day, which is whenever he says it is.” She looked wistfully at the barred windows, through which could be seen the cloudy ceiling of the cavern and little else. “I wish . . .” She shrugged. “No use thinking about it. He brought me here and it’s been kinda tight in some ways. Well, sort of. But what good is it being a queen if nobody knows I’m one but these ugly nerds down here? I mean, if I was married to a King up above, I’d be all up in a photo spread in People magazine and they’d interview me in Cosmo and shit, and Paris and Britney would’ve come to the wedding . . .” She sighed.
She was a tall, slender, long-necked woman, perhaps late twenties, with dull, red-rimmed blue eyes and a slightly weak chin, though she was for the most part conventionally pretty. Her hair looked a bit brittle to Maureen, and her fingernails were badly chewed up, and her hands trembled. She coughed, seeming obscurely unwell. She wore a long blue chiffon dress with a train, the hems curling up with age, the collar sewn with threads of gold.
“Do you feel okay, um, Your Majesty?” Maureen asked.
The queen’s lips trembled as if she might burst into tears, but her expression became stoically wooden when a man stumped into the room, a stooped old man, shorter than the queen, with a long pale face, shoulder-length white hair, a wisp of white beard, and hooded rheumy eyes. He wore a black doublet and stood regarding them with his head tilted to one side, as if he were looking out of only one eye; he leaned on a cane that seemed m
ade from human bones, its handle a skeletal hand folded into a fist. Draped over his shoulders was a purple robe; on his head was a five-pointed crown of gold, its points tipped in opals.
“My Lord,” said Megan, standing to curtsy for the King.
Maureen gaped for a moment, then remembered to curtsy. “Your Majesty.”
“At least her manners are fitting,” said the old man, sniffing, his voice creaky. His accent was peculiar, utterly foreign and yet somehow innately British. “You may keep her as a servant, for the remainder . . . for as long as you like, my darling, if she behaves herself,” the King continued. “I have come to tell you, my queen, that we are needed in the throne room.”
“Very well, My Lord and King,” said Megan, her voice as wooden as her expression.
He turned and stumped away. One of the guards followed.
Megan went to the door and closed it. “I suppose you’d better help me put my tiara on. It’s there behind you on that table. It’s kind of a pain in the ass. There are some pins . . .”
Moving stiffly, Maureen got the tiara—little more than a circlet of gold, with a few diamonds woven into it—and pinned it on Megan’s head with some rusty old pins of iron. Some of the queen’s hair crumbled away at the pressure.
“Queen Megan, it must be hard for you to have such an elderly husband. I don’t mean to be rude, but you’re so young . . .”
“Oh yeah, I know but”—Megan shrugged wearily, straightening the little tiara as she looked at her reflection in a girandole of polished silver—“he’ll be young again in the morning. He’s got a machine he goes into; it does something, makes him young again, but it only lasts the day. When it starts to get late, about when it would be dark up above, he’s getting really hella old. In the morning he’s a young man again, but in the afternoon he’s, like, middle-aged, and in the evening he’s getting pretty damn old all over. By eleven or so he’d be dead except he gets his rejuvenation charge. Then he falls asleep. It sort of works on him overnight and then in the morning he’s all young again—for a while.” She smiled wryly. “I kind of like him in the mornings. He’s more upbeat, all full of plans, and of course we have sex, which is okay sometimes, only he does it in a funny way; he never kisses and he plays weird little games with it.” She patted at her hair again and frowned when some of it came away on her fingers.
“Your hair, Your Majesty,” Maureen said tentatively, “it’s like you’re not getting enough vitamins . . .”
“I’m so totally not getting enough vitamins! I told them that! I need vitamin D, I need sunshine, I need a more balanced diet, not just meat and mushrooms and those weird little moss things and those—I don’t know what it is and I don’t want to know. Just like . . .”
“Just like what, Your Majesty?”
“You can call me Megan when we’re alone. Oh, just like I don’t want to know when the end is coming—when he’s going to . . .”
“Going to what, Megan?
“He has a new queen pretty often. I mean—sometimes, from what I can find out, he keeps them for as much as, like, ten years. One, I heard, he kept for seventeen. It’s only been a few years for me, but he’s already bored. And the one before me . . . I guess he got rid of her after a few months. She was pretty bitchy or something. She tried to pull some shit on him.”
“He gets rid of them? You mean—a divorce?” But she knew that was not what Megan meant.
Megan shook her head. “I don’t know exactly what he does with them . . . I don’t think I want to know that, either. I just know he doesn’t let them go. And they disappear.”
“Oh God! Don’t you think about escaping?”
“I heard about one who tried. But the gripplers caught her. He fed her alive to the crankers. They eat human flesh.”
“Fed her alive to . . . what are crankers?”
“Oh he puts a lot of his prisoners down below to crank his machine. They live in some sort of really nasty-ass pits down below. They get changed into things by . . . Gawd, I don’t know how they do it. But that’s where Queen Loreen went.”
Maureen felt a hand clutch at her heart. Bosky could be down in that pit. He might’ve been captured by now. Anything could’ve happened. She couldn’t feel him, not exactly; she thought he was alive, but in a place like this life could be worse than death.
The queen wiped tears away and added resignedly, “Oh, come on . . . let me fix your hair a little, and then we have to go. And don’t talk to me all familiar and stuff out there; we have to be, y’know, really formal and, like, regal—and all that kinda shit.”
~
“What do you reckon they’re doing, Granddad?” Bosky asked, as they crept out to the ledge overlooking the smoky, foul-smelling cavern.
“I’m buggered if I know,” Garth muttered hoarsely, surprising Bosky. He rarely used such language around his grandson.
This was a much smaller cavern than the one the village was in; it was about the size of a high school gymnasium but with a higher ceiling, its floor mostly taken up by a stack of rusted oil barrels and a sump, a big hole filled with multicolored fluid, bubbling and surging with glutinous muck, all mixing together, of ugly brown and shiny black and vitreous green. Men worked on the tables of stone to either side, watched by soldiers in black and silver armor, their faces pale as paper, and overseen by a man in a black hood.
Bosky squinted through the caustic murk for a while, then decided that none of the people below could be Geoff. One of them could well be the vicar. There were others he was sure were from the village. This was part of why the village had been brought down, he supposed. Some kind of urgent project. And the village of Tonsell was the closest surface town to this cavern.
About forty feet above the sump was a crane of iron, with silvery cables running through it to two dangling hooks holding up a big cauldron of stone banded with iron.
Granddad opened his mouth to say something and then broke up into a spasm of choking, spurred by the fumes from below. He squirmed back, shaking his head, gesturing for Bosky to come away from the ledge.
Bosky drew back from the ledge and they returned to the tunnels, Bosky carrying the rifle. Without it they’d never have gotten this far—they’d barely gotten into the tunnels ahead of the gripplers. Only now they didn’t know where to go.
Bosky found himself thinking of Finn. They hadn’t tried to go in that barrow tunnel after Finn, the way he was going to find Geoff now. Of course, him and Geoff had been closer, but still, Finn was his bruv, and he’d given up on him . . . and let the gripplers take him. Partly it was that MacCrawley geezer. Looking into his eyes had turned Bosky’s spine to jelly, that one.
Maybe Finn would be wherever Geoff was. Or maybe they were both dead, and already cold . . .
“The light’s growing up ahead, Bosky!” Granddad said, his voice raspy. He stuck his electric torch in his coat pocket. “I think there’s a big cave out there . . . maybe the same one we come from, maybe another . . .” He paused to cough. “Be very careful now, Boswell.”
“You okay, Granddad?”
“Got a lungful of them fumes back there, and they did me no good. I’m an old man, and tired. Maybe we’ll look for a place to rest a while . . .”
Then they emerged onto another stony balcony, looking down over a gigantic cave. The ceiling of the cavern was dark with smoke or clouds of some kind, and most of the light came from the walled-in palace, a complicated structure glimmering with intricate ornament, fanged with towers, watched over by gargoyles. There was a strange little town beneath the hill of stone the palace was built on, with square flat roofs, twisty streets, a maze of clay and wood and stone, very old, with scarcely a wall uncracked. Fires burned here and there in the little town; dark figures moved around the fires. At first they saw no harpies, but then he saw that what had seemed gargoyles were harpies roosting on the battlements of the Gothic castle, their wings folded.
“Get an eyeful of this place, Granddad!” Bosky exclaimed.
“Str
angely dark, compared to the one they had the village in,” Granddad remarked. “I didn’t see the stairs here at first, in all the shadow.”
“Stairs?” What he’d thought was a balcony was in fact a cupola-like landing topping a flight of stairs down to the town. “Oh yeah.” But he didn’t suggest descending them.
“I don’t know as we should go any farther, Bosky,” Granddad said. “It’s all too big to search through. And look there—soldiers on those walls at the palace. Like the ones in that cavern with the . . .” He paused to cough. “. . . with that bubblin’ pit. And I tell you the truth, I’m not sure we’re doing the right thing, boy.”
“We’re going to find Geoff and the other people who were taken. I thought I saw the vicar in that chamber with all the bad smells. And other people from Tonsell. Maybe we can rescue him!”
“But what about your mum? I think we should be looking for a way up! Someone had to be going up there, to set this thing up. We should be looking for a way up, so we can get your mom out that way!”
Bosky thought about it. Probably Garth was exhausted, and feeling sick, and wanting to get back to someplace more familiar. But he was right too. There must be a way up to the surface. He looked up at the thick swirl of clouds near the ceiling of the cavern; stalactites glimmered through the clouds, dimmed but still glinting, like thousands of eyes in the night. It was not an encouraging sight.
“Okay, Granddad, we’ll go back to the village, and find our way back up. Come on—”
He broke off, gasping at the sight of the skull-faced soldiers rushing from the tunnel mouth, weapons raised, faces contorted. They shouted something in a language he didn’t understand. He whipped the rifle around to point at the soldiers, who came to a stop, for a moment unsure of themselves as they stared at the unfamiliar weapon. There was already a bullet chambered, and Bosky pulled the trigger.
The rifle didn’t fire. He looked at it and saw it was loaded, the safety was off, it should fire—he felt something slam into his chest then, knocking the wind from him, and he went over backwards onto the stone, gasping and in pain. The soldier who had hit him with the butt of his pike was standing over him, aiming the point down at him. Then Granddad was rushing at the soldier, swinging his electric torch like a club, shouting,