It was laughable, and so that’s precisely what Ely Stern did.
Like a great gout of flame, the laughter erupted from him, went booming down the passageway, preceding them into the entrails of hell.
When his mirth finally subsided, he turned to Cal Griffin, who had once been his underling and now was a great deal more than his better (not that he’d ever dream of saying that).
“Let’s get this show on the road,” Stern said.
The ghostly warriors unslung their weapons, carbines and bows and arrows made of vapor, and climbed aboard their shadow steeds. Indian fashion, the war ponies had no bridles nor saddles, no stirrups. Their tails were tied in a knot.
May Catches the Enemy followed suit, clambering aboard a dappled gray made of mist, which supported her just as though it were entirely substantial.
Colleen saw that nearby, Mama Diamond was speaking softly to one of the spectral mares, in a tongue only she and they could understand. Then she mounted it, with an effortlessness that was uncanny in a woman of her years, not to mention one that had endured such rough handling of late.
Colleen approached a pony that still remained riderless and recalled the words her father had said to her, of how he chose a dog.
I look in its eyes, and if I see a soul there, I take him home.
Cautiously, she drew near the creature’s head, looked it square in the eye…and found reassurance there.
She climbed aboard.
It sat her well. She pressed her knees gently into its sides and wove her fingers into its insubstantial mane.
Seeing Doc hesitate, Colleen called out, “C’mon, Viktor, it’s just like riding a bicycle.” She was careful not to add, One called back from the dead.
Enid mounted a sorrel mare, hauling Papa Sky onto its rump behind him. Enid had his harmonica secured on its holder around his neck, Papa his sax on its strap.
The others climbed aboard their horses, Inigo and Howard Russo; even Walter Eagle Elk and his grandson Ethan, too.
Cal was the last to mount, and before he did Colleen saw him stash the battered leather portfolio inside his Ghost Shirt; the portfolio Goldman had brought him upon returning from his mission to fetch Enid Blindman, that she knew held an enigmatic collection of photographs and notes.
“What do you say to make it go?” Cal asked May.
“Hoka hey,” she said.
“Hoka hey!” he cried, and the legion of them thundered off down the passageway, the horses’ hooves flying into the darkness.
It’s kinda instant replay, but not exactly, Inigo thought as he flew along the endless rock tunnel, down and down, back toward the place he’d lived in but never called home.
The last time he’d tried a stunt like this, he’d been clinging to the top of the hellbound train, plunging through the darkness to burst up out of the earth and deliver its gleaming treasure to Jeff Arcott and the waiting town of Atherton. Right now, he was holding on for dear life to the wispy mane of a nag that’d probably been bleaching bones on the prairie before Teddy Roosevelt was out of short pants.
This was better, if only marginally; the wind whipped at him, howling like a lost soul-or an army of them, more precisely. But the real army was the one riding alongside him-the ghost warriors and the human ones; Howard Russo, who was a creature like himself; the dragon Stern; and Christina, ever fair and flowing. If necessary, Inigo knew she was a beacon he would follow to his own burning death, or beyond.
He was not alone in this. Her brother Cal had done the same thing. It’s what had led him to trust Inigo in the first place, despite the misgivings of his closest advisers; what had led him here, where’d he finally rescued his sister, only to return to the dread place of her imprisonment, in a wild attempt try to finish things up right.
Inigo realized that he liked Cal, he liked him a lot. And from the little he’d seen of the two of them together, so did his mom. Yet there was something else there, too, something troubled, that seemed to have a history in it. He didn’t think the two of them had met before, didn’t think they could have. Still, he made a mental note to ask his mom about it later…if there was a later, that was.
He realized his heart was pounding like a drum machine on meltdown, that he was scared right down to the soles of his leathery big feet. He forced himself to take a deep breath, tried to slow his pulse to a level below tachycardia.
Just then, the spirit horse banked around a sharp bend in the passage. Inigo yelped and clutched tightly to the beast’s compact, muscled body so as not to be thrown clear. There was a roar from up ahead, and a burst of hot air surged past him, tingling his face like sunburn.
It was Stern, flying fast at the forefront, exhaling great explosions of flame every minute or so to clear the road. It lit up the cave spectacularly, making Inigo wince with the glare, providing flashbulb brilliance to accompany the more muted light provided by Christina’s aura and the cool glow of the spectral warriors and their steeds.
Inigo wondered how long Stern could keep this up; did his flame come from some internal gas tank, or was it replenished from some other font?
We’ll see soon enough….
Apart from Stern’s warming blasts, the tunnel was cold but not freezing, and the air was fresh. Behind him, Inigo could hear Enid Blindman and Papa Sky atop their mount, playing full out over the wind. The music hardly echoed at all, which surprised Inigo.
But then Mama Diamond explained that was due to the boxwork, the odd crystal formations in the ceiling, so-called because they looked like square post office boxes all in rows.
They didn’t look like that to Inigo, though; they seemed like thousands of bats, just waiting to wake up and swarm down at them. He shuddered and fought to banish the thought.
“And see that there?” Mama Diamond shouted to him as they thundered on. “That white bumpy stuff’s called cave popcorn, calcium carbonate deposited through limestone pores. And that curtainy stuff hanging down off those high ledges is called drapery, though it always reminded me of Wells’s Martians, fat jellyfish with all those tentacles. Nail-head spar, and dogtooth…It’s just crystal, though, laced with different minerals like iron and manganese.”
Inigo suspected she was telling him all this because she sensed his apprehension, saw him as just a kid, and was trying to distract him from what lay ahead. It was quaint, courtly even, and it touched him-rather than pissing him off with its condescension, which it normally might have done.
Hell, they all had to look out for each other any way they could, even with the small stuff.
“I reckon we must be five hundred feet down, if we’re an inch,” Mama Diamond continued. “And will you look at what’s up ahead….”
Inigo cast his gaze forward, feeling a hint of trepidation for an instant. But then he saw it, stretching out wide before them….
A lake, huge and black and serene, showing not even a ripple, save where an occasional droplet of water fell from the vault above. Stern winged above it into the darkness beyond, a perfect dragon reflection skimming below him in the water’s mirror sheen. The wraith horses sped after, their hooves barely kissing the surface, throwing up light, bracing sprays.
Then they were past it. Inigo looked about him at the walls and ceiling, seeing deep into them with his night-blessed eyes, really studying them for the first time as they flashed by. They were incredibly beautiful, rose and blue and gold sparkling in the quartz, an astonishing array of shapes, spires and projections all honeycombed, with rivulets of water dripping down from fissures in the rock.