Hellblazer 2 - Subterranean (30 page)

“What?” Spurlick shook his head. “By no means! We will go together! The King will know it was I who came to his aid!”

“Just as you like . . . Captain, we’ll call you if we need you.”

Fallesco opened the door—not too widely—and held it as Spurlick sidled in.

“Fallesco, open the door wider!”

“The King’s privacy must be preserved insofar as it can be!”

Grumbling, Spurlick entered, Fallesco coming behind him. He closed the door on the anxious, paper-colored faces of the guards, and turned to see Spurlick staring at the bed, where the King had apparently fallen asleep during coitus with one of the guards. Both men snored softly, the King with his arm thrown around the other man, his trousers about his knees.

Fallesco chuckled. “It appears the King’s tastes are more eclectic than I had supposed.”

Spurlick sensed something was further askew than a change in sexual preference. He approached the King. “My King, I’m sorry to disturb you, but I have reason to believe a conspiracy is afoot. There have been secret meetings, there are missing guards, and . . . My King? Why, I believe he has been dru—”

He never quite finished the word, his last sound being an
eep
noise, as Fallesco, clapping a hand over Spurlick’s mouth, used his other hand to drive a dagger into the courtier’s heart. Spurlick quivered, struggled flailingly for but a moment, and then went limp. “That should keep you out of mischief, Lord Spurlick.”

Fallesco let the dead man’s body fall over the sleeping men on the bed. The King stirred as Spurlick’s blood spurted onto him. The tyrant Culley would wake soon . . .

Fingering the edge of the dagger, Fallesco told himself that he ought to kill the King now. He badly wanted to, and it would be so very easy. But Constantine had said the King must be alive for the spell to be safely undone.

Sighing, he wiped the blade, returned it to its sheath, and went out to speak to the guards. “Gentlemen, the King is deep in conversation with M’Lord Spurlick. He wishes you to guard the door, and no one is to enter for at least an hour!” And Fallesco strode self-assuredly away.

The Captain stared after him suspiciously. Finally he said, “You two, guard the door. The rest of you, come with me. I wish to decide for myself what is going on. We will check the corridor behind the throne.”

~

Constantine and MacCrawley were just arriving at the door to the corridor behind the thrones when the Captain of the guards and four soldiers rushed up from the opposite way. They stopped, gawking at the two bloodied bodies of the sentries sprawled at Constantine’s feet. They looked at the dead men and they looked at Constantine. “Take them!” the Captain of the guards shouted in Latin.

“Well that’s just brilliant, Constantine,” MacCrawley said with disgust, as the guards started toward them, drawing their swords. “You’ve brought me here only to get us both killed.”

“Psychic attack, perhaps . . . telepathy,” Constantine suggested, wondering if it would do any good to run.

“What, all five of them? Don’t be stupid. Gentlemen—” MacCrawley put up his hands like a felon caught by the police as the guards surrounded them, raising their swords. “I submit to arrest, but I advise you to kill this conniving con artist. It is he who’s behind the deaths of these good sentries, not me! He’s tricked me into—”

Then a looming presence, a thud of heavy feet . . .

And Balf was there, rushing in from behind the guards, swinging a poleax made of petrified wood. He swung right and left, smashing bodies aside like a man with a machete cutting through undergrowth. Two of the guards screamed and panicked, stumbled into one another, and went down with a single brutal, bone-crunching crack of the poleax. The Captain of the guards managed to fire a single bolt from his crossbow, which stuck in Balf’s right shoulder a moment before the Fallen Roman’s crossbow and his bones were shattered by a single sweep of the troll’s great weapon. The Captain went tumbling, shattered within himself.

Balf casually plucked the arrow from his shoulder as a man would remove a thorn, and turned to Constantine. “I was looking for you in your quarters. The woman of fairy blood sent me; she said I should watch your back, and though the term is somewhat confusing I divined her meaning. Now . . .”

Balf turned and swung the poleax once more, smashing in the door.

“I do have a key,” Constantine muttered. He shot a sharp look at MacCrawley. “And you; I thought we agreed no treachery?”

“Well, in the circum—”

“Never mind, let’s get on with it. The noise of the fight’s been heard. More of those skull-faced bastards coming. Balf, off with you, take up your post near Scofield, if you would, squire.”

He led the way into the corridor, toward the last room, where the Lord of Stone waited.

~

Scofield was growing increasingly nervous. Coughing sporadically from fumes, Lord Blung was again examining the seething brew, the gigantic cauldron of preparatory solution for the Universal Solvent, and it seemed to Scofield that Blung’s satisfaction with the proceedings suggested he was about to pour the final ingredient into the mix. Whereupon the land above was doomed. And Scofield had not yet made up his mind about his part in all this.

His hope that his sabotage here would turn out for the best was based entirely on the word of a stranger, a man with an unsavory reputation: John Constantine. Many had come a cropper, relying on Constantine’s word. True, they’d mostly been right bastards. But still, even if Constantine was trustworthy, he might bungle the whole thing. The odds, after all, were against him. On the King’s side was the King’s power and his minions, numbering in the hundreds and thousands: the harpies, the gripplers, the army. Not to mention a number of sleazy back-stabbing eavesdroppers, like Spurlick, who hoped to curry favor with their sovereign, though of course they secretly hated him.

On Constantine’s side were one vain poet, two teenage boys, a woman far out of her depth, and an unpredictable troll. And there was Constantine himself, a notorious con artist.

The odds for success in the rebellion against King Culley simply didn’t seem good. And at any moment Blung might notice the hole in the ceiling, punched through from the chamber above by the troll. It was hidden in mist rising from the cauldron . . . most of the time.

Blung glanced at the hourglass. “It is just about ready to pour. There is no use in waiting for the King. Let us pour the final ingredient.”

“But it’s not yet a full hour.”

“You seem to be laboring under a misunderstanding,” Blung declared, with pompous condescension. “The final ingredient can be applied at any time in the last hour, Magus Scofield, once the solution seems ready. And clearly it is. Notice the flecks of mercury making tiny bobbing pellets at the edges; notice the strong smell of iron, alternating with sulfur. Notice the increase in corrosion at the edge of the cauldron. These are infallible signs!”

“No, no, I disagree,” said Scofield, hoping he wasn’t too obvious in his stalling. “Look, there are really very few mercury pellets, and the corrosion is left over, it is old, it is not of recent origin—”

“Nonsense! Look at that pitting! The solution eating away at the cauldron is hungry for the final ingredient! Once we pour in the tincture, the full solvency, the
universal
solvency, will transmutate into highest potency, and the solution will eat through the cauldron in seconds!”

“But . . .” Scofield pretended to have a coughing fit. He made it last as long as possible.

“Perhaps you haven taken ill; I advise you to go to the infirmary. I can handle this.”

“Respectfully, seneschal, I am the more experienced with the Solvent, I must stay, and I do believe we must not put the final ingredient in too soon, or . . .” Here he managed another reasonably believable coughing fit. With the fumes there, it wasn’t hard to do.

Blung cocked his head and looked at him skeptically. Clearly becoming suspicious. “I’ll wait a few minutes, but already the last stream of sand falls through the hourglass, Scofield! We must do the King’s bidding, and soon!”

Scofield thought:
I’m being a fool to try and stop him. I must let him do as he wants, or I’ll die with all the rest . . .

~

“The Lord of Stone is the real key to his power, then?” MacCrawley asked musingly.

“He is,” Constantine said, taking out the key to the final room beyond the rejuvenation projector chamber. Both of them ignored the pleas and babblings coming pathetically from behind them. “The great machine run by the crankers gives him rejuvenation and some of the energy running the palace—heat and light. But his magical control extends from right bleedin’ here.”

“However did you manage to get the key to this room?” MacCrawley asked. “I’ve been looking for a way to get at it these many months.”

“Sex opens doors,” Constantine said, opening the door.

“Oh I see. You used the new queen . . . cunning of you.” MacCrawley irritated Constantine hugely with this remark. “I just hope, Constantine, that you’ve not got us in deeper than . . .” MacCrawley broke off as they entered the chamber, gazing with awe up at the Lord of Stone. He remembered himself and bowed low to the elemental. “Great Lord of Stone, king of earth elementals, I honor you.”

The Lord of Stone’s reply rumbled through their minds, and grumbled in the walls, the floor underneath . . .

Honor me by ending my captivity—a captivity brought about by one of your own ephemeral, deceitful, underhanded kind. I hold all your perfidious species responsible. But if you release me, magician, you have nothing to fear! Someone must pay the price, but it will not be you.

MacCrawley bowed again. “But there is the matter of the suppression of ritual magic; your own magic power is siphoned off to stop anyone’s magic but the King’s. If it takes magic to release you . . .”

There is a way. John Constantine, go you to the wall, behind me. There you will see the bones of two men, and the tools they brought with them here to enlarge this chamber, so that the Gloomlord could steal my magic the more effectively.

Constantine walked around behind the sphere and found the bones of two men, both with their skulls severed from their necks. They’d been executed here, it appeared.

Culley did not want anyone to know what was in this room, and he killed the two after they completed their work to keep the secret. Now take up the chisel and hammer you see lying there, and take three steps in the way of your left hand . . .

Constantine picked up the rusty tools, which had lain there undisturbed for generations, and took the three steps, to stand before the back wall where water was trickling thinly down from a crack.

Now raise the chisel and strike, three times, just under the place where the water drips.

Constantine did as he was bid, striking hard, and on the third blow the crack widened with a creaking sound and water sprayed out, hitting him in the chest. He stepped hastily out of the way. “Bloody hell that’s cold.”

The water was about the same as might run from a garden hose with the spigot fully open. It gushed toward the dais and began encircling it, making a pool on the floor around it.

Constantine put the chisel down and returned to MacCrawley, as the Lord of Stone rumbled,
Thus the Lady of Waters is freed to surround the stone on which stands my cage. The power the Gloomlord uses is the elemental power of stone, darkly transubstantiated for his purposes. The power of the Lady of Waters is another manner of energy which blocks his power within the pool. Here you may now perform ritual magic without the interference of his spell of suppression . . . but always staying on the stone platform, within the circling water.

“Splendid!” MacCrawley chuckled. “Let’s be at it.”

Constantine was already at work, hunched over on the dais, murmuring magical formulae as he set about marking the dais’s floor—a foot above the water, dry but enclosed by it—with the chalk he had brought, inscribing sacred signs, names of power, runes of invocation, and relevant alchemical symbols within a circle around the sphere. He worked quickly, concentrating intensely, not allowing himself the luxury of the slightest lessening of close attention to the work, still angry with himself for the time he’d wasted after the feast.

He finished circumambulating the caging sphere, but hadn’t yet closed the magic circle.

He looked significantly at MacCrawley. “The blood,” Constantine said. Simple as that.

MacCrawley nodded and drew a magical dagger from his waistband: a lucky find in the King’s library, picked up on the way here. Its slim silver blade was incised with magical symbols, its handle made of human bone carved into the shape of a seraphim. He used its point to prick his arm, dipped the blade in the blood and completed the circle with it; Constantine, after cleaning the blade, did the same with his own blood, so that the circle was completed by blood from both men. Then he laid the magic dagger across the edges of the circle, pointing outward.

The two magicians then walked around the spherical cage of energy, going in opposite directions, passing one another three times, chanting sonorously in Latin:
“Libertas consummatio, regio silex!”

Liberate completely the King of Stone!

“Libertas consummatio, regio silex!”
Not merely saying the words, but making them resonate through their whole being, thinking their meaning, projecting that meaning through the clearly formed mental picture of the magic circle, like directing light through a magnifying glass to sharpen its power. And magical energies thrummed in the air, making Constantine’s mouth go dry, his pulse pound, his eyes misty . . .

They heard boot steps drumming from the corridor. The King’s men had found Balf’s victims. They were coming . . .

Constantine felt an impulse to panic, to despair. It was too late! But he focused his mind, the current from above flowing through it, once more, and he chanted more forcefully than ever, his voice merging with MacCrawley’s:

“Libertas consummatio, regio silex!”