Dark Kingdoms

by Richard Lee Byers

  "You don't understand," he said. "When I joined the Circle, I swore to Tyr that I'd never back down. That I'd make myself a warrior fit to stand against Oblivion at Ragnarok. I promised myself that from then on, I was going to be a different person. But when the crunch came, I chickened out again, just like I always did when I was alive!"

  "Courage doesn't mean throwing your existence or your freedom away uselessly," the Sister replied. "Moreover, people do change. I believe that's why we become wraiths in the first place, to refine our natures until we're worthy to Transcend. Even if you froze yesterday, you can be brave tomorrow. Simply resolve to do better. When you do, perhaps you can even free Barbara and the others."

  He blinked. "Do you really think so?"

  "I don't know," she admitted. "The Underworld is a bleak, cruel place, and the Hierarchy is one of the cruelest: things in it. Your friends could already be on their way to Stygia. But until we know that for a fact, we mustn't abandon hope. Please, finish your story."

  "There isn't much left to tell," Philip said. "After the raiders sailed away down river, Warren and I just hung around here. I guess we were too dazed to do.anything else. And gradually I started to blame him for my cowardice. I told myself that if he hadn't stopped, I wouldn't have either. I would have run right out and attacked the Hierarchs. And maybe I could have taken out the redheaded guy, and that would have turned the tide. In the end I hated Warren so much that I just had to tear into him."

  "Did any of the Legionnaires have two reptilian heads?" the Sister asked.

  Clearly puzzled, Philip frowned. "Not that I noticed. They all looked pretty human. The usual sprinkling of horns, cloven hooves, and that stuff. Why do you ask?"

  As briefly as possible, she told him about the assassin who had stalked her through Greenville.

  "Do you think there's a connection?" he asked.

  She grimaced. "I wish I knew. We have too many unanswered questions. Has someone truly been systematically destroying missionaries like me, Heretic leaders, and Pardoners? If so, one would logically suspect Spectres, since wraiths of every other stripe value Pardoners, given that we all need to quell our Shadows on occasion. But now that we know the Hierarchy is raiding Heretic communities, logic also suggests that it's responsible for the disappearance of the priests as well. Otherwise the synchrony of the two campaigns is too much of a coincidence."

  "But why would you even bother to assassinate individual Heretic masters if you intended to destroy entire Circles at once?" Philip asked.

  "It doesn't appear to make any sense, does it? Perhaps you were right, and there's nothing to the gossip you heard. Maybe it was just the luck of the draw that made the double-headed spirit decide to hunt me. In any case, we should be glad we aren't entirely in the dark. We do understand the nature of the greatest threat facing us. For some reason, the local Hierarchs have grown militant again. It's imperative that we Heretics strike back hard enough to convince them to leave us alone. Otherwise they'll pick off our enclaves one by one."

  "But what can we do?" Philip asked. "Does the Sisterhood of Athena have an army?"

  "A small one," the blond woman said, "but it won't come east of the Rockies. It has too many commitments on the West Coast."

  "Then we're beaten," Philip said. "There were too many Hierarchs, and they fought too well. No Heretic Circle in the area is a match for them."

  "Possibly not individually. If they unite, it could be a different story."

  "It won't happen," Philip said. "They all hate each other as much or more than they hate Stygia."

  "But they all want to survive," the Sister said. "And some of them don't hate me." She smiled wryly. "That's the advantage of preaching wishy-washy, nondenominational fluff. No one worries that I might lure his parishioners away. I might be able to bring a selection of the local Renegades into the coalition, too. Some of them are shrewd enough to grasp that once the Hierarchy finishes crushing Heretics, it's likely to come after them."

  "But do you really think we can defeat Legionnaires?" Philip asked.

  She had no idea. Perhaps no one would listen to her, or everyone who did would perish uselessly on the battlefield. But with the ease of long practice, before death

  Bewildered, Bellamy paced the frigid walkways and galleries of the dark stone city, past grotesque: statuary and small, iron-bound doors sunk in odd corners of immense carved tableaux, almost as if the architect had been trying to hide the entrances amid the details of the sculptures. OccaSiprially the FBI agent's wandering took him across a narrow iron bridge, where, looking over the side, he saw level after level of chambers and corridors, sporadically lit by some of the ghastly anthropomorphic torches, falling away into darkness beneath his feet. Sometimes he blundered onto a terrace, where huge towers with crenellated ramparts loomed above him.

  Whenever that happened, he scurried back inside as quickly as possible. Because for some reason he couldn't—or didn't want to—remember, the black, starless sky with its flickering thunderheads disturbed him even more than the obsession with suffering and death manifest in many of the carvings, the soft moans whispering from the gulfs below him, or even his;own inability to remember how he'd come to this place.

  After what seemed like hours, he climbed a staircase and found himself on a balcony connected by an arcing span of gray metal to a similar platform jutting from the rococo facade of the adjacent tower. On the other side of the bridge stood a slender, feminine figure in a voluminous scarlet robe. A red wooden mask concealed her features, but not the magenta streaks in her spiky hair.

  "Astarte?' he asked.

  She stretched out her hands as if she could neither speak nor run to him, but was beseeching him to come to her.

  Even though it meant stepping out under the open sky, he was eager to do precisely that. She was the first familiar thing he'd sfeen since his arrival, indeed, the first person. With a pang of trepidation, and forbidding himself to look either up or down, he strode onto the unrailed bridge. The metal surface clinked beneath his tread.

  The world blazed white, and a deafening crash split the air. Dazzled, he sensed rather than saw the length of bridge in front of him shattering like glass. He reflexively dropped onto his belly and wrapped his arms around the span of metal beneath him.

  From the way it was shuddering, he doubted that he'd actually done himself any good. He wasn't sure if lightning had struck the bridge itself or merely something nearby, but in any case it felt as if the entire structure was about to tear away from its moorings and fall into the manmade canyon below.

  But if didn't, and when the vibrations subsided, he cautiously raised his head. Now separated from him by the gap in the bridge, Astarte sunk to her knees in a pantomime of despair.

  and after, she concealed her doubts behind a smile. "With the Aesir's help, why not?"

  He felt an urge to run and jump to her. But even had he been sure he could leap far enough, either of the remaining Sections of bridge might collapse at any moment, particularly if subjected to stress. As he wormed his way backwards, he said, "Don't worry! I'll still get to you. There has to be another way across."

  As if to make a liar out of him, lighting flared and thunder boomed again, violently shaking his perch. This time, he saw a forked bolt of glare strike the cornice of the building on the other side of the drop. The wall disintegrated, the rumble echoing the growl of the thunder. An avalanche of stone fell down the side of the structure, and Astarte and her balcony fell with it.

  "No!" Bellamy screamed, and then her tiny form vanished into the gulf.

  He sobbed, though, strangely, his eyes remained dry. Then he realized the rumbling sound was still grinding on and on. In fact, it was growing louder, with a steady, rhythmic beat which suggested laughter. His section of broken bridge began to shudder.

  After a moment he realized that it wasn't just his perch. All of the towers around him were swaying, also. Evidently the lightning strikes had triggered an earthquake.

  One by o
ne, the mighty buildings collapsed, the rubble streaming into the darkness below. Bellamy expected the broken bridge to fall at any moment. But for some reason it, and the edifice to which it was attached, endured while other structures crumbled, as if God wanted him to witness the devastation.

  Still trying to inch backward to a safer position, ludicrous as such a concept now seemed, he did watch. And at first he wasn't particularly afraid. The spectacle unfolding before him was so huge and strange that it inspired wonder instead of dread.

  But as the city dissolved, he began to glimpse what lay below it. The shards of stone weren't just tumbling to the ground, or even into some gigantic crevice that had opened in the earth. They were falling into a well of darkness that glittered and spun like a whirlpool. As soon as Bellamy caught sight of it, he sensed that it was the pure essence of annihilation and simultaneously the primal fountainhead of cruelty and madness.

  The overwhelming probability that he was doomed to drop into the vortex filled him with terror. He tried to creep backward faster, while the bridge began to creak, squeal, and shake more violently. His groping foot brushed the edge of the balcony, and then something snapped. He and his perch lurched forward—

  —and he thrashed, his arms immobilized, metal clattering. After a moment, panting, his heart hammering, he realized he'd just awakened from a nightmare.

  In reality, he lay on a bed in a small room, his hands shackled, quite possibly with his own handcuffs, to a post in the carved oak headboard. A figure stood over him. He had to peer for a moment to be certain it was Marilyn. Her lean body clad in a nondescript suit and narrow knit tie, her face scrubbed clean of makeup and her wig discarded, she might almost have been mistaken for a heterosexual male. Only her plucked eyebrows, crimson nail polish, and the modest bulge of her breast implants betrayed her transsexuality.

  "Did you have a bad dream?" she asked mildly.

  He certainly had. Something about the dark city the mystic symbols had shown him. And a black whirlpool.. .Waxman had claimed to have seen something similar in his visions! Maybe the dream had actually meant something.

  Or maybe it hadn't. Bellamy was no psychic. He'd probably dreamed about the vortex simply because Waxman had told him about it. And, in any case, he had more immediate problems. He tried to speak and discovered that his mouth was painfully dry.

  Marilyn picked up a crystal tumbler of water from the night stand and held it to his lips. The cold liquid soothed his throat wonderfully. He was tempted to guzzle it all, but he knew too much could make him sick.

  His captor took the glass away. "Where's Astarte?" Bellamy asked.

  "She's safe," said Marilyn. "She's resting comfortably in another bedroom."

  "Good," Bellamy said. "Who are you really?"

  "The Chancellor of the New Orleans Chapter House of the Arcanum," Marilyn said with a hint of pride.

  Bellamy shook his head, trying to understand, his mind still fuzzy from the drug she'd given him. "Then the place we found you in, the story you fed us..."

  "Some of what I said was true. I do frequent that establishment, and I do partake of what you might consider rather sordid pleasures there. When a person carries as much responsibility as I do, it can be an exquisite, relief to feel helpless and weak. But more importantly, the bondage and humiliation are a means to an end. To perform the Great Work, an alchemist has to explore every facet of his character, psyche and shadow, animus and anima, master and slave. That's why I haven't had my final surgery yet, even though my body is ready. I think it benefits me to be hermaphroditic."

  "Are you telling me you let people tie you up and spank you so you can learn magic? If so, I think you can Stop now. Your Witches' Alphabet hexed the heck out of me."

  Marilyn shrugged. "I can create one or two minor effects, sometimes, with hours of preparation. So could you, if you undertook the proper course of study and meditation. But my tricks are nothing compared to genuine sorcery. I onCe spied on a true mage through a pair of binoculars. The miracles he created, one after another, as easily as you or I could snap our fingers!"

  "Maybe you should have, asked him to. give you a lesson."

  "A number of Arcanists have tried. Some have been turned away. Some have been cursed for their presumption. And a few have disappeared, perhaps because the mage accepted them, perhaps because he killed them. Suffice it to say, even if I were given a chance to make the same request, I don't like the odds. I'd rather try to discover the wizards' techniques of empowerment independently, through study and experimentation."

  "I see your point," Bellamy said, flexing his shackled arms to ease a cramp. "What I don't get is why, if you are. one of Keene's colleagues, you witched me, doped me, and handcuffed me. I showed you my credentials."

  "Identification can be forged. And even if you were a genuine FBI agent, what does that mean? What master do the Federal police actually serve?"

  Bellamy grimaced. "I think you've been watching too many Oliver Stone movies."

  "You may be right," Marilyn said. "On the other hand, it may be that all of us, the ordinary people, the uninitiated, are simply cattle, and our laws, institutions, and the dogma we've been raised to believe are the fences our owners use to keep us in our place.

  "Be that as it may, I had good reason to be wary of you in particular. It seemed unlikely that a legitimate investigator would conduct his business with someone like Astarte in tow."

  "I admit, I'm poking around without Bureau authorization," Bellamy said. "That's because my boss doesn't believe in the paranormal. And I just sort of wound up saddled with Astarte."

  "You also told me that R. ]. was killed by a statue that came to life. I believe in such occurrences, though I've never had the good fortune to witness one. They're well documented. But the news media said he was killed with a gun." The transsexual picked up Bellamy's Browning from a small parquet table. "If I gave this particular pistol to the police for a ballistics test, I wonder what the results would show."

  "That it fired the shot that killed your friend," Bellamy said. He could feel a cold sweat breaking out under his arms. "Because the statue picked it up and used it. I didn't tell you every detail of my story. I didn't see any reason to. But I can if you want."

  "You already have. Shortly after you arrived, we gave you a second shot, of truth serum, and interrogated you extensively." Marilyn smiled thinly. "We Arcanists are more than a society of bookworms and theoreticians. We train ourselves to handle desperate situations as competently as Federal agents do."

  Bellamy felt mingled resentment and relief. "If you questioned me under truth serum, then you know I'm on the up and up. Stop playing mind games and take off the handcuffs."

  "It isn't quite that simple," Marilyn said. "I now find myself in the awkward position of having assaulted and kidnapped you."

  "I'm not going to arrest you," Bellamy said. "God knows, I should, but if Astarte really is okay, and you help me catch the Atheist, I'll let you off the hook."

  "But you'll know about the Arcanum. You'll know I'm a member. And you're an FBI agent. Aren't you duty-bound to report your discoveries to your superiors?"

  "I know how to protect an informant," Bellamy said, "even from my bosses when I have to. Don't you want to help me nail whoever—or whatever—killed Keene?"

  "I liked R. ]. But he was a liability. He held the shortsighted attitude that we ought to run around protecting people and righting wrongs as if we were the police ourselves, bringing the wrath of the supernatural down on our heads before we were remotely prepared to cope with it. You see where it got him."

  "In other words, he deserved to die. And so do the rest of the Atheist's victims."

  Marilyn scowled as she set the Browning back on the table. "No, of course not. You're deliberately distorting my point of view. Which is that the Arcanum has to walk softly until it can acquire enough information to make a difference for the entire human race, not just a few isolated individuals."

  "If the individuals don't
matter, then the whole human race doesn't either. And maybe to you, it doesn't. Maybe all you really care about is scoring some magic for yourself."

  Marilyn's eyes narrowed. "You can't provoke me with insults."

  "What about with logic? If you don't help me, or even let me go, what's the alternative? Are you going to hold Astarte and me prisoner forever? Or murder us? Are you that unscrupulous, and that stupid?"

  "I hope it won't come to that," the Arcanist said. "We know how to use drugs for brainwashing as well as interrogation. We can expunge your memory of the Arcanum so thoroughly that no trace of it will remain, and then release you unharmed."

  A ghastly picture popped into Bellamy's mind. He imagined a cop loading him into the back of a squad car again, dazed and disoriented, with a second hole in his memory. Such a fiasco would unquestionably cost him both his career and any hope of ever catching the Atheist. At that moment, even death seemed preferable.

  He struggled to think of another argument, to find a way to convince Marilyn to help him, when a scream reverberated through the building. The transsexual frowned, wheeled, and ran out the door, leaving her captive alone.

  A man shouted, "My god!" Then something crashed. Bellamy wondered what was happening.

  Whatever it was, he knew he didn't want to stay handcuffed to the bed if the disturbance was going to spill into the room, or, come to think of it, even if it wasn't. He inspected the carved post that Marilyn had looped the handcuff chain around, and then he smiled.

  The Arcanist might chink she knew as much about security and restraint as any Fed, but she was kidding herself. The headboard looked reasonably substantial, but a strong man might be able to break it.

  Bellamy rolled off the mattress. The motion brought a surge of dizziness and nausea. Silently cursing Marilyn and her drugs, he knelt on the gleaming hardwood floor with his body pressed against the side of the bed, anchoring himself as best he could. Then he gripped the post and pulled.