by John Shirley
The guard, artless and bored, looked pleased and took the goblet, drained it straightaway, and moments later fell with a clatter in the hallway, snoring.
Constantine hurried up to the door, grasped the guard under his armpits, and dragged the unconscious man inside, laying him on the bed beside Culley. After a moment’s thought he quickly arranged King and guard on the bed in positions that made the imp chortle once more.
Then Constantine and Maureen, closing the door of the bedchamber, hurried down the stone corridor to begin a process that would either save them, or kill them.
14
A MAN CANNOT BE TOO CAREFUL IN THE CHOICE OF HIS ENEMIES
Carrying a light-crystal in his hand to illuminate the way, Scofield was muttering to himself as he strode along the path beside Stabbing Falls in search of the troll. “I’m a damn fool to trust Constantine, and I’m a damn fool to be trusting myself to a damned, damned, double-damned troll.”
The double-damned troll grabbed him from behind just then, encircling him with a massive arm, and drew him into a deep hollow in the rocky wall to one side, clamping a hand over his mouth. “Hist!” whispered the troll. “Keep quiet—they come!” He smothered the light-crystal with his other hand. Scofield froze, more afraid of the troll than of whoever was coming; he could feel the enormous manlike being’s looming presence, the heat from his body hunched over him in the hollow.
A few seconds more, then Scofield heard the tramp of boots, and beheld a patrol of six Fallen Romans, marching two abreast up the path toward its end at the falls. The Fallen Romans marched obliviously past.
“They are searching for you, Scofield,” Balf whispered. “Constantine has spoken to me through a calling crystal; he had the tale from Fallesco: you were not at your post when the seneschal Blung went to supervise you there. You are scarcely within the boundaries of the realm here. Look!”
He pointed at a fluttering dark shape, bat-like but made of shadow-stuff, just outside their concealment in the cliff. “There, you are being watched by that fell creature. Hence, the guards know where to find you.”
Scofield nodded and Balf took his hand from his mouth. “What of the guards?” Scofield whispered.
“I will deal with them.”
Balf took a curiously shaped cutting instrument from a belt of tools about his massive waist. He turned to the stone wall, felt about on it till he located a big knob of stone, then tapped it with a crystal held in his other hand. He listened to the crystal, nodded, then struck at the edge of the knob in the exact right spot with the cutting tool, and a crack spread around the knob, encircling it, till a bushel-sized boulder simply dropped from the wall. Balf caught it easily in his big left hand and, carrying it tucked against him and returning the tool to his belt, he stepped out into the path, in clear view of the Fallen Romans at the other end beside the falls.
They shouted in Latin, and a crossbow arrow flashed past Balf’s ear. He was already throwing the boulder, like a man pitching an enormous softball. Scofield peeked out of concealment and saw the boulder smashing into the front two soldiers in the rows starting toward Balf, striking them so hard they flew backwards, one into another, and all the pale soldiers pitched backwards, wailing, off the cliff, down into the pit under Stabbing Falls.
“That’s done,” said Balf. “But others will come soon enough. There is no time to think of your dignity.”
“What do you mean by that?” Scofield asked, holding the light-crystal up to see better, but he had his answer in the next moment as Balf lifted him onto his shoulder, in a fireman’s carry, and climbed up the wall, using handholds only he could see.
“Damn you, troll!”
“Do not call me ‘troll,’ my name is Balf Corunsiggert Stonecracker of the Icy Black Unseen River Which Seeks the North Sea, or just Balf if you prefer. And as for my nature, I am an Azki-Hak. The term troll has such unpleasant connotations.”
A few moments later he put Scofield down at the entrance to his cave. “Where are we . . . Balf?”
“My hiding place and work chamber. Come around this way . . . up this shaft . . . and you will find yourself in a tunnel that I do not believe the King knows about.”
“But the shadows will follow us, and then he will know, when he awakes.”
“Give me that crystal.”
Scofield handed it over and Balf tucked it into a pouch, dousing its light. They were in deep blackness. “The shadows need light to see, and to be. They will wander, lost, now. Hold on to my neck from behind, and I will carry you.”
Scofield obeyed and, growing used to the rank smell of troll at close range, allowed himself to be carried up a cliff, through a tunnel, and then another, in pitch blackness. Two miles at least they went, wending this way and that in cold, damp, echoing darkness.
At last Balf declared them free of the following shadows and brought out the crystal. It showed a hemispherical chamber, only about thirty feet in diameter, and just high enough to admit Balf’s head without his stooping.
“Hullo, Balf, you great Azki-Hak bastard, how are you?” Constantine cried, coming into the chamber from another entrance.
“I am well enough,” Balf rumbled. “Anything is better than chains, even life as a fugitive.”
“Constantine!” Scofield cried. “What have you been about?”
“Putting the King to nighty-night,” Constantine said, lighting a cigarette. “Maureen’s done it, really, with Fallesco’s potion. She’s waiting down below; I’ve got to get back to her, soon as I confirm the con with ol’ Balf here. Running low on these,” he added, looking at the Silk Cut critically. “You want one, Scofield?” Scofield nodded, and Constantine handed him one and the lighter, as Balf, on calloused hands and knees, searched about the floor for something neither of them could see. “May as well smoke the buggers,” Constantine went on. “There’s so little time left. We’ll either get out right smart or die like dogs, soon enough; I’m not surrendering to the King’s men. Too many nasty ways to die . . . or worse, down here.” He blew smoke at the ceiling. “Right. What have you got for us, Balf?”
“You will see.” Balf was tapping the stone floor experimentally with a crystal, muttering to himself in some language Scofield didn’t understand.
And at last the troll grunted in satisfaction. “Ah. Here we are.”
He tapped the floor carefully with his tool, and a chunk of stone four feet across fell away, to crash in some hollow below. Light shafted up from the break in the floor.
Scofield knelt beside the hole and saw with surprise he was looking down at his own work cavern; the toxic sump, the Universal Solvent, bubbling away in its cauldron, held in chains over the waiting pit of toxins.
“That is where you and the King have been doing your mischief, is it not, Magus Scofield?” Balf asked. “Constantine told me of the place, and the deed.”
“It is,” Scofield admitted, looking away from the troll’s baleful stare, wondering if Balf intended to kill him for cooperating with Culley. Easy enough for the troll to pitch him down through the hole into the cauldron . . .
“How does the cauldron hold this Solvent?” Balf asked. “Why does not the cauldron melt away?”
“It will,” Scofield said, “when the final ingredient is added, which will be done when the solution you see has completed its transmutation. And that is, by my reckoning, in less than three hours. If I don’t put it in, or the King, Blung the seneschal will do it, and he’ll be heavily guarded.”
“And then the Solvent will eat a hole through the cauldron, and the container of the sump, and thus into the underground river, which will take it to the sea?”
“That is the King’s plan. Thus destroying the upper world.”
“But suppose we were to move the cauldron?”
“We cannot reach it from here. It is guarded by Il-Sorg! No flung boulder will stop them!”
“But if Constantine can get them out of the way . . .”
“It could be done; the destruction of Bri
tain would then be delayed, I suppose.”
“Could be stopped completely,” Constantine said, “if we wreak enough havoc down here. Sort of a specialty of mine, wreaking havoc. It’s a gift.” He blew smoke at the ceiling. “Some have it, some don’t.”
“You see,” Balf said, his star-spoked head illuminated by the glaucous light from below as he gazed down into the sump cavern, “I know these caves as no human does. There is a place we might move the cauldron to; when it is poured, something interesting will result. Very interesting indeed . . .”
“Scofield,” Constantine said, “you’ve got to go back to work; tell them it was all a misunderstanding, you’re eager to work. Talk fast if you have to but get into that room. And wait for the signal.”
~
The guard stationed in front of Bosky’s luxury cell, alone in the barren stone hallway with nothing to look at but the strip of glowing crystal at his feet, was yawning with boredom when Constantine sauntered up and asked, in Latin, “How’d he get away, friend? I’m just curious.”
The Fallen Roman compressed his lipless mouth. “How did who get away, magician?”
“The boy you’re supposed to be guarding. Can’t imagine how he escaped.” He shouted the last two words in English so Bosky would get it. Then translated in Latin: “He escaped!”
“What? Nonsense!” The guard turned, unlocked the door, and looked in . . . and Bosky was nowhere to be seen.
Constantine, meanwhile, was concentrating, visualizing Bosky, sending the image telepathically—for telepathy worked here still if ritual magic didn’t—and the guard turned back to the hallway only to see Bosky scurrying around a corner, taunting, “Fuck you, noseless!” the illusory Bosky shouted.
The Fallen Roman shouted in fury and sprinted in pursuit of the phantom, drawing his sword, leaving the door open behind him.
“Come on out, kid!” Constantine hissed into the apartment. The real Bosky emerged from the apartment’s privy where he’d been hiding, prompted by Constantine’s cue, and rushed grinning into the corridor.
“Crikey but I’m glad to see you; they’re draining me dry, the bastards!”
“Come on, your mum’s waiting around the corner, the other way, with Geoff. We’ve got to hurry before that gormless skull-face gets back here.”
~
There were two Fallen Romans posted on either side of the threshold of the corridor behind the throne, when Constantine and friends trooped up to it.
The skull-faced guards scowled at them: one very tall and the other very short, the difference comically extreme. They made a slight obeisance, the mere inclination of their heads, to the new queen. Queens weren’t taken very seriously in the kingdom of the King Underneath.
“No one is to pass!” said the shorter of the two.
“Two of them, thank the King’s wisdom, somehow still alive!” Constantine said, in Latin. “With so many others in the King’s army dead, we were afraid the contagion had reached you too!”
“Contagion?” asked the shorter of the two guards, in Latin. “Of what do you speak?”
“You have not heard? A madness afflicts your men, sent by the rival sorcerer, to destroy the army from within! The victims become rabid and attack one another murderously!”
“I have heard nothing of this. What sorcerer sends this killing madness?”
“Why, ah . . . Mer . . . flermian. The . . . third.”
“Who?”
“Merflermian the Third! You must have heard of him. But look—your partner is afflicted!”
And as he said this Constantine projected a telepathic image to the shorter guard; his true companion was blotted out, opaqued by the false image of the same man drawing his sword, snarling, foaming at the mouth, swinging the sword at the littler man. “Die, scum!” the image shrieked, though it was heard by no one but the littler guard, who instinctively drew his sword and swung it at the other.
The taller guard, having heard fearfully of the contagion, turned to see the shorter one swinging his blade at him. He leaped back, drew his sword, and the two men set about fighting, furiously, back and forth, their attention consumed with the life-and-death struggle.
Constantine nodded to Maureen, who drew out the King’s keys and passed the chain to him. He sorted through the keys, found the one that unlocked the door, and they hurried through, leaving the guards, still clashing swords, behind them. Constantine closed and locked the door, once they were through, and they hurried on through the several intervening doors, unlocking each in turn, until they came to the portal that emanated a sinister cold.
“This’ll be a bit of a shock, Maureen,” Constantine warned her, unlocking the door.
They entered the icy corridor and Maureen covered her open mouth with her hand, staring at the frozen women in the farther chamber. “Oh God.”
“Oh Christ on a bloody bike,” Constantine muttered, “there she is, too.”
They all saw her then, Queen Megan of Beverly Hills. Frozen through and through, she was dressed in a white gown, standing in front of a mirror, arranging her hair, her mouth open as if she were talking, eternally talking, talking . . .
“Oh poor Megan!” Maureen said, bursting into tears. “That monster Culley!” Bosky put his arm around her and escorted his sobbing mother down the corridor.
At long last they reached the room with the rejuvenation projector. Constantine made the others wait outside; Maureen had seen enough.
He unlocked the door, went through, quickly closing it behind him, and passed under the babbling prisoners of the mold, through the purple glow of the projector. Ignoring Lord Smithson’s high-pitched pleading, giggling, and more pleading, Constantine crossed hastily to the farther door, the one the King hadn’t wanted to talk about.
He tried all the keys in the lock but one, murmuring, “This last one better be it, or me whole theory’s fucked and we are too.”
The key seemed reluctant to work, but at last the tumblers clicked over and he swung the door open.
Inside he found a cavern, about a hundred feet in diameter, its upper reaches lost in shadow, its floor illuminated by the glow of a giant’s eyes.
The giant was four times bigger than Balf, a massive, man-shaped creature apparently of stone and crystal, granite marbled with quartz; yet where stone would be inflexible and hard, for the giant it bent without breaking, merely creaking in the bends of his arms and legs as he shifted restlessly about in the faintly glimmering transparent magic sphere that entombed him alive. The sphere stood on a foot-high raised dais of stone, with just room to walk around the rocky platform’s circle.
This was the chieftain of earth and stone Constantine had suspected would be here—a powerful elemental, as kingly a figure as the Lady of Waters was queenly. His head, indeed, was surmounted with alternating spikes of ruby and emerald: a crown that grew from his granite brow. His broad, inscrutable face was a craggy carving; his glowing eyes, flames licking from them, were formed of molten stone, and they beamed out like red-bulbed lamps. Their rays now fell on Constantine, with an unnerving warmth, both of the heat of his internal being, and the tingling of his psychic inspection.
He spoke to Constantine with his mind:
Who comes now to mock me in my imprisonment? Another puny sorcerer? Someday I will make it my business to seek out sorcerers and dismember them, taking my time about it.
The walls of the cavern seemed to rumble inwardly with the reverberation of his words, though they were expressed only in thought.
“I have come to relieve you of your imprisonment, if I can, squire,” Constantine said, bowing. “I perceive you to be royalty amongst elementals, a lord of the stones! It isn’t right you should be cooped up, and I assure you, your enemies are mine, great king of the earth!”
You speak with unctuous flattery but not without truth. I have foreseen your coming. Water drips here, sometimes, and one with whom I mated of old, whom you know as the Lady of Waters, has spoken to me here, drip by drip, telling me you wo
uld come if you could. But you cannot open Fludd’s trap alone.
“So that is what Iain Culley used to jug you here, squire? ‘Fludd’s Spell of Dire Containment’?”
That is the spell that was used, but the wretch Culley was not the invoker of it. Fludd himself entrapped me, saying he wished only to hold me a single day and night so that he might question me in safety. I did not honor him for the entrapment, but he did me no harm, and since he was a servant of the Overgod, I would have gone my way without punishing him for his impudence. But the wretch Culley informed on Fludd to the little minds who held the reins of the worldly church, and they took him away to demand answers from him for what they supposed was heresy, though it was they who were the heretics. With Fludd gone, Culley took command of me, tormenting me with corrosive acids until I did his bidding. I may send certain emanations from this containment—only such as he stipulates, and with one of these I caused the earth to open up and swallow the magical cage, and Culley, so that we were lowered together into this cave. He said that he would release me once we were here. But it soon became evident that he intends to keep me in the cage forever. My elemental emanation is the source of his control over his kingdom, suppressing all sorcery but his, shackling the harpies and gray demons to his will. Woe to you if you do not release me and he learns of your enmity! For my power, so long as I am trapped, is his power!
Constantine approached the cage—the sphere of containment—and put out his hand, feeling its power . . . and drew his hand back quickly. It felt as if the energy bubble was conscious, aware of him, warning him spitefully to stay away.
He closed his eyes and extended his psychic prescience, instantly perceiving that the spell drew on the elemental’s own power, against the Lord of Stone’s will, and turned it against him; a thorny problem in spell-busting.
Do you now perceive the difficulty? the elemental asked. The spell was created by two men, Fludd and Culley, incanting together. It must incorporate both light and dark energies from two magicians at once to be complete, even as a cage of steel must contain yielding space as well as unyielding metal. Fludd provided the light energies, Culley the dark—for Fludd knew Iain Culley to be formed for the Left-Hand Path. He hoped to convert him to see the wisdom of the Overgod through the intervention of the Crucified One, but Culley would not have it. He betrayed Fludd and hid me away from him.