too dark to see.
A wind of ancient screams blew past them and out through the gaping wound in side of the suicidal god’s corpse. Eve had slain one of the Erinyes, murdered part of the fabric of the mythology that had sifted down from the earliest age of the world. The myths and legends, the soul debris of that primeval time, had not so much woken as twitched in the midst of its death throes. The ghosts of gods and the lingering specter of a thousand years of worship had felt the slaughter of one of the Kindly Ones, and had lashed back. Like a tornado of retribution, the grandeur of a bygone age had risen against them. It might subside, but Ceridwen did not believe it would do so before they were all dead, before blood had been spilled in exchange for the blood of Tisiphone of the Erinyes.
Once more she urged Eve toward the way out of Hades’ corpse. It would take ages to return to the surface world — to Conan Doyle’s world of Blight — but Ceridwen did not want to think about how they would manage the journey. She only wanted to be moving.
'We can’t. We have to wait for Doyle,' Eve said, eyes narrowed in anger and doubt.
Ceridwen bared her own teeth, aware that her ire could be just as terrible as Eve’s if pushed. 'Arthur left us to face some task he felt he had to confront alone. If his life were ebbing, I would know. If his heart were breaking, I would know. I feel him, woman, every moment of my life. How can you think I would leave him here? He will follow, and the best we can do to aid him is get ourselves to the exit from this blasted place so that he does not have to concern himself with our escape.'
Eve stared at her, eyes gleaming yellow in the strange darklight of the Furies’ Hell.
In the midst of Hades’ heart there was a battle raging. Gigantic figures of metal and leather armor, supported only by bones and spirit-wraiths, the mad ghosts of the Greek gods, were battling with an army of swift, brutal soldiers grown from the ivory teeth of the Hydra.
Danny Ferrick had saved them all, forcing Nigel Gull to sing in the voice of Orpheus. Even now the demon boy was by Gull’s side and he no longer looked so much like a boy. It pained Ceridwen to see his transformation, but Danny was all demon now. The hatred in his eyes and the way his black-red skin glistened made him monstrous and terrifying, even more so than his horns or claws. He seemed to have grown during their time in the Underworld, his chest broader, his arms thicker and more powerful. It occurred to her that perhaps he had been tainted by this place just as she had been, and she hoped that both of them could somehow be cleansed.
But Ceridwen had little faith that either of them would ever be the same.
The changeling was clearly ready to kill Gull if he stopped singing. The voice of Orpheus rang sweetly through the Underworld, cutting through even the ancient cries of the damned. But Gull could not sing forever. The towering, shambling gods had ceased their battle. Even the Hydra’s children had stopped attacking the dead things, the shades of gods.
Ceridwen gestured for Eve to look at Gull. The sorcerer’s twisted face — as misshapen as his soul — showed the strain of his effort, and his eyes revealed his fear of Danny. Somehow, once controlled by Orpheus’s song, the demon boy had become immune to it, and Gull had not bothered to try it on Eve and Ceridwen.
The girl, Jezebel, was dead, leaving Gull with only Hawkins as an ally, and the cold man with his colder eyes seemed only to want to survive, now that things had gone so terribly wrong.
'We’ve got to go,' Ceridwen insisted.
Eve stared a moment longer at Danny, Gull, and Hawkins, and then she nodded.
'All right. But we don’t go back out through the gates of this place without Arthur.'
Ceridwen moved so swiftly that Eve could not stop her. Her fingers tangled in the vampire’s hair and she gripped it painfully tight, even as she sent tendrils of ice racing down over Eve’s face.
'We are allies, sometimes friends,' Ceridwen said. 'But question my loyalty once more and one of us will die.'
Eve slapped her hand away, fangs lengthening again. She hissed softly, held Ceridwen’s gaze, then turned away.
'Danny! We’re going!' Eve snapped.
The demon boy looked as though he wanted to argue, but then his gaze shifted from Eve to Ceridwen and back again, and instead he nodded once. He grabbed Nigel Gull and propelled the mage toward the wound in Hades’ side. The skin around that gaping wound was ossified, insects and strange creatures fossilized in the dead god’s flesh.
Ceridwen led the way, leaping from the dizzying height of the exit toward the black ashen earth below. She drew a wind beneath her as she fell, and landed easily. Before she could even turn, Eve dropped to the ground beside her, striking hard and rolling, kicking up ebony dust on impact.
Both of them turned to watch Danny climbing down the exterior of the unimaginably huge body, plunging his claws into the dead flesh and scrambling downward as though he was a spider. For a moment Ceridwen was surprised he had left Gull and Hawkins to find their own way down, but then she realized that the mage and his operative needed to flee this place just as quickly as she and her allies did. Emerging through the wound, Gull grabbed Hawkins by the hand, his mouth still open, the voice of Orpheus still flowing sweetly from his throat. Tentacles of blue-black fire wrapped around them, then shot toward the ground like lightning, carrying them down to stand only a few feet from Ceridwen and Eve.
Hawkins’s expression had changed. He pulled away from Gull with a rictus of horror contorting his face.
'You right bastard!' he snarled. 'You fucking killed her!'
Gull had no chance to argue. He had chosen Hawkins not only for his various psychic skills, but also for his murderous talents. When the man had touched Gull, he had learned who was responsible for Jezebel’s fate. Now Hawkins backhanded Gull, driving him to the ground with a pair of quick jabs to the throat and gut. The mage had no time even to summon a spell to defend himself before Hawkins launched a kick at his head.
'Son of a bitch! All Jez wanted was someone to be loyal to, someone to make her feel like there was such a thing as family. She would do anything for you, and you threw her away like some gutter whore!'
Hawkins kicked Gull twice more in the head, then in the arms as the mage tried to block the attack.
Eve and Ceridwen ran at them, but Danny reached them first. He had been spider-walking down from the wound when it began. Now he leaped from the side of Hades’ corpse and somersaulted through the air, snapping his feet out at the last moment so that he crashed into Hawkins with a sort of dropkick that sent the silver-haired man tumbling across the black, blasted earth.
'What the hell are you doing, you moron?' Danny thundered, his voice no longer his own, but coming from some darker realm. 'You’ve killed us all, assclown. You’ve goddamn killed us all.'
For a moment, Ceridwen did not really understand. Then she heard the screams of angry gods from inside the corpse of Hades, and the ground beneath them began to rumble, and the entire wall behind them — the wall that was body of the king of the Underworld — began to tear in places, new wounds being ripped open in a handful of places along its length.
The ghosts of the gods were marching once more.
Hawkins had crushed Nigel Gull’s throat with one of his blows.
The voice of Orpheus had been silenced.
Eve grabbed Ceridwen by the wrist.
'Run.'
On the southern slope of the Spartan acropolis the land leveled out and rough, grassy terrain gave way to forest. Between hill and forest was a pit bordered by stone. For just a moment, as Dr. Graves came round the side of the hill and first caught sight of the place, he saw its ghost. Once upon a time the ruin had been a theatre, and imprinted upon the very air itself was the ancient shape of the thing. Though he himself was a specter, they were different sorts of ghosts, and so he saw it only fleetingly before the image gave way to the modern reality. Granite walls were crumbled, the marble stage was only partially revealed, the rest buried beneath the earth as though the theatre was growing up organically from the ground. The rows and rows of seating — where thousands of people had once sat enraptured — were eroded by time, but echoed silently with the laughter and cheers of audiences who had been dead two thousand years or more.
In the deeper darkness of an alcove — almost a bunker — that had been created long ago by the collapse of a section of the wall, something shifted, moving swiftly and fluidly. If Medusa had come to this place to rest, she had managed little of it.
Graves moved away from the ruins, backtracking around the hill.
