Pure Dead Brilliant (8 page)

Down the Hatch

(
A.D.
145: Becalmed somewhere off northeastern Caledonia)

T
he war against the Celts had been one of the most bloody campaigns ever waged in military history, illustrating what happens when vast empires attempt to crush the life out of small but determined guerrilla tribes. Death came to the pristine shores of Nova Caledonia as each high tide surrendered its grisly flotilla of Roman corpses, which provided rich pickings for the flocks of hooded crows blowing in on the December gales.

Captain of a warship engaged in an attempt to recapture the port of Lethe, Nostrilamus had been mortally wounded when an iron vat of boiling pitch exploded on deck and embedded long shards of metal in his legs. Now he lay in his stateroom, his skin the color of tallow, his injured limbs a stinking mess of putrefaction. Visitors to his sick bay had to hold vinegar-soaked sponges to their noses in order to withstand the stench, and even the ship's surgeon refused to attend his patient, preferring to take his chances on deck in the mercifully clean-smelling gales that threatened to capsize their craft. Even these winds were unpredictable. Yesterday the warship had wallowed in peaks and troughs larger than herself but today, becalmed south of Aberdonium, the wind had vanished at dawn, turning the surface of the water into jaundiced glass and causing the sails to hang limply from the masts. Surfacing briefly from his delirium, Nostrilamus ordered the oars to be used and, exhausted
by the simple effort of giving a command, sank back on his befouled bed of pelts as the great drum began to beat the rhythm for those slaves unfortunate enough to live below decks.

Heave—thump—heave—thud—
faster
—crack—heave—thump
it went. And just audible below the rhythm of the drum came the sound of groans and sobs as the oarsmen strained and struggled to overcome the dead weight of the ship and, by their efforts alone, force it into motion. In this creaking, claustrophobic underworld lit by smoking oil lamps, the slave-master held dominion. He strode up and down the passage between the rows of manacled oarsmen, flicking a lead-tipped whip over the shoulders of those he judged to be working at less than a killing pace. From time to time a deadly fatigue would overcome a slave, and he would slip from his place to fall under the oars with a scream of terror.

“
Thump—heaaave—thud—heaaave—thump—heaaave—
you guys have no sense of rhythm whatsoever.” The slave-master strode up to the drummer and tapped him on the shoulder. “I
said,
” he yelled above the din, “where's your sense of rhythm? Can't you do a bossa nova? A tango, then, how about a tango?” Seeing the look of sullen incomprehension on the drummer's face, the slave-master sighed. “Oh, all
right
. A dashing white sergeant? Strip the willow? Oh, give me
strength
—come on, guys, lighten up a bit. . . .”

Thump—heave—thud—heave—thump—heave.

With an exasperated
tssssst,
Astoroth turned his back on the slaves and their drummer and climbed up through a hatch onto the deck. Squinting in the daylight, he drew in a deep breath of fresh air. Not much longer now, he reminded himself. Find out where Nostrilamus hid the Chronostone, collect same, dispatch him, harvest his soul—and head back to the Hadean Executive with the joyful tidings that the plan was now in place and he was long overdue a promotion from the dreary task of being Second Minister with a special responsibility for pacts and soul harvests. He was heartily sick of shunting back and forth through time, enduring the massive discomforts and perils of centuries without flush toilets and antibiotics. . . . When I'm promoted, he decided, strolling past the galley where the unappetizing smell of the lunchtime broiled dormice wafted through an open hatch, I want to be forever in the twenty-first century, with endless access to wealth, magnetic good looks, and nonstop room service. . . . His thoughts were interrupted when the rank meatiness of the odor of lunch was suddenly overlaid by something infinitely more unpleasant—a foul miasma of decay that intensified with each step that Astoroth took toward the stateroom, where Nostrilamus, the once powerful Malefica of Caledon, was fighting his last battle with the foe none could vanquish.

Astoroth paused, taking a small square of muslin from his pocket and sprinkling it with oil of vetiver from a tiny flask kept on a chain round his neck. Crumpling the scented muslin in his hands, Astoroth sniffed it and then folded the cloth into a triangle and fashioned himself a rudimentary face mask. Thus attired, he moved forward through the press of legionaries grouped outside the stateroom. As the door was opened for him by a gagging slave, those on deck were engulfed in an odor so vile that all save Astoroth were driven to retch and rush for the ship's rails. Propped up on pillows, Nostrilamus appeared to be mercifully unaffected by his own effluvia. The dying man was utterly engrossed in writing a will, absentmindedly batting blowflies away from his face and apparently unperturbed by the mass of maggots that squirmed in the cyanotic flesh of what had once been his legs. Livid lines of red ran upward from the wounds, arrowing toward his heart—harbingers of his approaching death from blood poisoning. Nostrilamus's breath came in ragged gasps, each inhalation an effort of will, each rattling exhalation ticking off the moments till his heart stilled. Without raising his eyes to the intruder, Nostrilamus spoke, his voice contemptuous, a far cry from his ambitious younger self, a wiser man now than he'd been all those years ago in a tavern in Caledonia.

“You again,” he whispered, laying down his stylus and passing the engraved wax tablet to the slave by his bedside.

“Payback time.” Astoroth crossed the room to stand over Nostrilamus, the Malefica of Caledon, ignoring the dying man's slave, who bore the waxen will and testament outside, closing the door quietly. “One thing, Caledon,” the demon murmured. “There seems to have been a mistake—the hoard of treasure in the forest contained something that was never meant for human possession.” He bent over his victim and tried hard not to breathe too deeply. “I want it back,” he said, in a voice intended to sound utterly menacing, but which emerged as faintly desperate.

With the hypersensitivity of one standing on the edge of the abyss, Nostrilamus realized that his tormentor was not in control of the situation. Moreover, he clearly recalled the day he had uncovered the treasure. In that strange metal trunk there had been wealth beyond his wildest dreams, but the thing he remembered above all was the gemstone, as big as a plover's egg, that sent light spinning upward from where it lay buried at the bottom of the hoard. The last time Nostrilamus had seen it, before fleeing for his life, the precious stone had been dangling from the ear of the dragon that had devoured all his legionaries. He felt his heart miss a beat and the chill creep up from his ruined legs. The room seemed to dim slightly and he knew that the end was almost upon him.

“Come on, you moron,” Astoroth muttered. “Where did you hide it?
Tell
me where it is.” With a deplorable lack of bedside manners he grabbed the dying man and shook him. “Tell me
now
or I'll—”

Nostrilamus laughed in his face, his last puffs of breath causing the demon to recoil in disgust. “Or
what
?” he gasped, the rattle in his chest more apparent. “What're you going to do to me that hasn't been done already? Kill me?” A hideous clotted bubbling came from him as he choked out his valediction. “Do your worst, Minister. You can't always get what you waaaaa—”

In his fury at being outwitted by a mere human, Astoroth nearly forgot to harvest the departing soul. Halfway to the door he remembered and spun on his heel just in time to see a small soot-black thing flutter out from the dead man's mouth. In truth, Nostrilamus's soul looked more like an animated prune than the luminous anima of popular mythology, but for all that it was still a soul. With one strike, the demon plucked it from the air, and, pausing briefly to savor the moment, swallowed
it whole.

“Right,” he growled, flinging open the stateroom door and pushing past the waiting legionaries. “I'm out of here.”

“Master?” said a centurion. “What news of Caledon?”

Astoroth had gained the side of the ship and was scrambling onto the handrail, hampered only slightly by his cloak. Far below, the oily water rolled and heaved, the surface broken here and there by drowned ribbons of bladder wrack. Balancing carefully on the rail, Astoroth rose to his feet, his arms outstretched against the sky, cloak billowing dramatically behind him, as he considered how best to break the news to the crew.

“
Vale,
CALEDON!” he roared. “I regret to inform you that your leader has popped his clogs!” Silence greeted this announcement. The legionaries frowned at him in some confusion. With a sigh, Astoroth rephrased his announcement. “The management is sorry to inform you that your boss has bought the farm . . . turned up his toes . . . shuffled off this mortal coil—” Frowns deepened, and a mutinous grumbling rose from the rear of the crew. Sensing that all was not going smoothly, Astoroth changed tack abruptly. “For what it's worth, guys, my advice is to forget trying to take over the world by battering the Caledonians into submission. Trust me, there's an easier way to achieve world domination. Just go home now, bury your dead, invent pizza, and learn how
to play football. . . .” Laughing insanely, the demon overbalanced, and, with hardly a splash to mark his passing, was swallowed by the sea.

The Ablutions of Astoroth

C
lasping a black leather toiletry kit, Fiamma d'Infer was first up to use the guest bathroom. At this early hour the corridors and passageways of StregaSchloss were deserted, and outside the world was silent. From the nursery the witch could hear the sleepy burblings that heralded Damp's awakening. Hobbling slightly, Fiamma slipped into the bathroom, closed the door behind her, and turned the key in the lock. She dumped her kit on the marble-topped washstand, checked the bath for spiders, and extravagantly turned both bath taps on full. Taking a small flask and cotton balls from her kit, Fiamma began to remove her makeup, which was somewhat the worse for wear after a night's sleep. What she uncovered with each application of cotton ball was a far older face than the one currently on display to her colleagues from the Institute for Advanced Witchcraft. As each layer of paint came off, a network of lines and connected liver spots was revealed, until at last she gazed on her naked face in the mirror.

“Eughhh,” she remarked pleasantly, reaching up to unpin her long red hair and hurl it across the room. Wigless, makeup-less, she resembled an ancient tortoise. Adding to this impression, she reached inside her mouth, groped around, and removed a set of teeth, which she placed carefully in the sink. Lacking the support of her teeth, Fiamma's lips collapsed inward and her face began to lose definition. Worse was to come: bending down, she seized her left foot and twisted it sideways with enough force to break her ankle. The foot unscrewed with the grim sound of bone grating on bone, and revealed itself to be a prosthetic device designed to conceal the fact that Fiamma's leg ended in a cloven hoof. She attacked her other foot with similar results, then placed both false feet in the sink alongside her teeth. Disrobing entirely, she squatted on the edge of the bath and proceeded to extrude a grotesque forked tail from some internal cache located deep within her stomach.

“What an
effort,
” she complained, turning off the taps and flopping into the water. She had no sooner settled comfortably in the bath than a muted ringing came from the direction of her toiletry kit. “Give me a break,” she muttered, as she climbed out of the bath and leapt across the floorboards to retrieve her cell phone from its hiding place.

“What?” she whispered. “It's
not
a good time right now.” Aware that even in summer one cannot stand around in Argyll in a state of naked wetness without courting frostbite, she climbed back into the bath and continued, “No . . . No, I haven't found it yet, but I know it's here somewhere. Yes, the clocks are all out of kilter. . . . Yes, I
know,
the signs all point to it being close at hand, but it's just not that easy to find a stone the size of an egg in the middle of an estate in Argyll. Have you any idea just how big this house
is
? Or indeed how much
stuff
these guys have been hoarding over the centuries? Do the words ‘needle' and ‘haystack' sound familiar?”

Fiamma leant back and listened as the voice on the other end droned on. Idly, she gazed up at the ceiling, noting the parlous state of the cornices and the sloppy housekeeping that allowed ropes of cobweb to crisscross the plasterwork.

“I am aware that I'll be reincarnated as a head louse if I mess this one up,” Fiamma murmured. “All too aware. However, that simply isn't going to happen. I can guarantee that there's as much chance of that as Hell freezing over. You see, I've stumbled on something while I was digging around here. Mhmmm, it's a real treasure. An infant magus. Mmmm-hmmm, lucky old me. Very small, somewhat undeveloped, unaware of its latent powers . . . Yes, I
know
it's appallingly hazardous to attempt to harvest the soul of one such, but if I can somehow win its confidence—” To mask the sound of her voice, Fiamma reached forward and turned on the hot tap, which, being connected to the dodgy StregaSchloss plumbing, obliged with a cacophony of splutters and clanks before it disgorged a gout of peat-stained water.

“No, no, I'm not breaking up, it's just my mud bath,” she continued. “Listen, you have to trust my judgment here. I'll get the Boss's precious Chronostone back, harvest the last male soul as per the agreement, and—as a bonus—I might be able to up the ante by harvesting a baby magus. Now, tell me
that
isn't going to make those red eyes glint? Put a point in your tail? Not to mention put me in line for a major promotion coupled with a meteoric
pay raise . . .”

Crouched in a corner of the ceiling cornice, Tarantella was absentmindedly grooming her abdomen while eavesdropping on this one-sided conversation. Clouds of steam billowed up from the bath, causing the tarantula to glare down at the bath's occupant.

“Hey, you down there. Yes,
you
. Do you have to use quite so much water?” She dropped vertiginously floorward on a skein of silk and bounced to a halt a scant hand's-breadth away from Fiamma's nose. “I mean,
look
at me,” Tarantella continued, giving a vigorous shudder to dislodge droplets of water vapor beading her furry abdomen. “Anyone with half a brain would know that spiders
hate
water, and here I am
covered
in it, thanks to yauuuuk—” A miniature tidal wave knocked Tarantella out of the air and swept her in a bedraggled tangle into a corner of the bathroom. Half-drowned, unable to pry apart her waterlogged legs and escape, the tarantula could only watch helplessly as the witch climbed out of the bathtub and bore down on her, still muttering into her cell phone. Frantically, Tarantella struggled against the film of water coating her limbs, aware that for once she would have been far wiser had she kept quiet. A foot shot out, its horny yellow hoof missing Tarantella's body by a fraction, but brutally amputating one of her legs in an attempt to consign her to oblivion. Tarantella's eyes widened in pain and terror, but she made a supreme effort to survive by dragging her body behind the waste pipe of the toilet. There, drifting in and out of consciousness, she inspected the damage. Extruding a lumpy length of spider silk, she gathered this into a sticky bundle and used it to plug the gaping wound where her leg had been.

Overhead, a loud crash followed by a shriek signaled that Fiamma's hoof had made contact with the unforgiving porcelain of the toilet.

By now, Tarantella was in too much pain to care. The spider- silk dressing was soaked with blood, and she hadn't the strength to replace it.

“Eughhh,” moaned Fiamma from somewhere above. “My poor hoof . . . No, not you, you idiot. Look, I'll phone you back. I've got to take care of something at this end. . . . Yes. Catch you later.” There was a beep as she switched off the phone. Then her voice dropped in pitch to a growl, causing Tarantella to cast around for a refuge—only to face the chilling realization that there was nowhere to hide.

“Right, spider. Eavesdropping on Executive business is a crime punishable by death. Lipping off to a Minister, ditto. Ignorance is no excuse. In short, you're legless, clueless, and about to be lifeless—”

“And you're hairless, toothless, and, it has to be said, charmless,” observed a voice, close to where Tarantella lay.

“Yeah,” agreed another voice. “Bog off, baldy. Pick on something your own size.”

Just before a pink mist settled over Tarantella's vision and bore her off to oblivion, she recognized the voices of StregaSchloss's free-range rodents, the Illiterat Multitudina and her educated daughter, Terminus. Before Fiamma could make good her threat to kill Tarantella, the rats hoisted the unconscious tarantula onto a stretcher improvised from a sheet of toilet paper and carried her away out of danger through a gap in the baseboard.

Thwarted, Fiamma's face contorted into something resembling a malignant walnut. Behind her, the bathroom mirror cracked from side to side, sending a lethal shower of glass cascading onto the floor. In the bath, water bubbled and hissed, turning a bilious yellow and emitting a feral stench. Underfoot, the floorboards rippled and bowed as if the wood had turned into a liquid that allowed a glimpse of something swimming below its surface. Then, as suddenly as it had appeared, Fiamma's rage vanished. The floor stilled its tidal motion, the bathwater returned to post-ablution grunginess, the mirror shards re-formed into an unbroken looking glass, and Fiamma looked within and found her reflection pleasing. Reabsorbing her tail, and replacing her makeup, hair, teeth, and feet, she strained to hear the sound that had caused her flash of temper to evaporate. The sound came again and she smiled. There it was: Damp in the distant nursery, her infant voice raised in song, greeting the day, with each note ringing pure and true.

“Such
untapped
potential,” Fiamma confided to her reflection. “Such
latent
power.” The demon licked its lips and gazed into the mirror, its foul mind looking out at the world through eyes that had changed shape and color countless times as Astoroth reincarnated himself for the express purpose of harvesting souls down through the centuries. The Borgia Inheritance was, thankfully, his final task as Second Minister for the Hadean Executive. Second Minister? The demon spat on the floor. Frankly, the Boss's dominion over Hades was way past its sell-by date. With the Chronostone plus the power of the baby magus's soul, well . . .

“Just watchhh me now,” Fiamma hissed, snatching up her toiletry kit and striding out of the bathroom, leaving the faintest whiff of sulfur in her wake.