Gull brought up a hand and ran the pads of his fingers lightly over the contortions of his face.
He turned toward the ferryman and though a thin tendril of his dread remained, he ignored it.
"Charon, will you carry us?" Gull asked, and the river seemed to swallow his voice.
The ferryman was perhaps twenty feet away. Even this close no trace of a face could be seen beneath his hood. Charon was entirely still — as frozen in place as his craft — master and vessel unmoved by ticking seconds or by the rush of the unfathomable river. It was as though they had ceased to exist for him and Gull watched him for any sign of recognition. Even so, when it came he was startled.
Charon extended his right hand, palm up. The skin was gray, colorless, and as dry as parchment. There seemed on that flesh the seared imprints of a thousand thousand coins, the images on that currency pressed into the ferryman’s very substance.
Gull hesitated.
The ferryman beckoned with his spindly fingers.
They were not dead. Not yet spirits. But apparently he was willing to deliver them to their destination. Perhaps with so few passengers Charon was not as discerning as he might once have been. Or perhaps the laws that governed this realm had withered away, just as the faith in old myths had, all of them losing their power.
"What are you waiting for?" Hawkins whispered.
Gull had never heard him afraid before. He glanced at the Englishman, saw Hawkins lick his lips. The man’s hands were shaking. Gull nodded twice. They were his people, Hawkins and Jezebel. His agents. He had brought them here. He was the catalyst for everything that was happening, everything that would happen.
Jezebel came up beside Gull and slid her hand into his as though seeking protection. There was ice on her fingers. "Don’t you still have the coin?"
"I have it," Gull said.
His throat was dry as he pulled the silver coin from his pocket. It had been struck in Mycenae in 1404 B.C. and bore the face of a ruler whose name had long since been lost to antiquity. Gull strode to the riverbank, hesitated a moment, and then waded in up to his knees. The water dragged at him and he could feel it leeching vitality from him. He felt unsteady on his feet, and not merely from the powerful pull of the current.
He placed the coin in Charon’s hand. The ferryman inclined his head, hood draping low, then that parchment hand disappeared once more within his robes. Charon once more gazed at Gull, or so it appeared, though it was impossible to know for certain when his eyes were lost in shadow.
The ferryman extended his hand again, palm up, thin fingers scratching the air, demanding.
A flame of anger ignited in Nigel Gull’s heart, burning away whatever trepidation remained.
"What is he doing?" Jezebel asked, coming to the river’s edge. "You paid him."
"Good sodding question," Hawkins agreed. He grabbed the still form of Eve by the arm and dragged her across the muddy bank to join Jezebel. "You said you did the research, that that coin would get us all across."
"I did, and it should have," Gull said flatly.
"Wonderful," Hawkins sneered. "Maybe the fuckin’ price went up. Inflation in the Underworld. Have you got some spell that’ll — "
"There isn’t any magick I know that would force a being like this to cooperate," Gull interrupted, glaring at those thin fingers, at the coin scars on that palm. The latest was the imprint of that Mycenaean ruler, whoever he had been.
Jezebel hugged herself and shivered, staring forlornly at the stark figure of the ferryman, holding out that wretched hand expectantly. "What do we do now?"
The ferryman simply waited, ominous and forbidding. Their transaction had begun. There was no way to know what would happen if they did not conclude it, what he might do. An unseen wind rustled Jezebel’s hair and caressed Gull’s contorted features, but the ferryman’s robes did not so much as shudder in the breeze. The river flowed. Charon remained motionless, implacable in his demand.
"Now?" Gull asked.
He reached beneath his coat and withdrew his pistol, a Robbins and Lawrence pepperbox. It was an original, made in 1849, a breech loader that carried five shots.
Gull put the first bullet squarely into the patch of darkness beneath Charon’s hood. The report exploded out across the river and was lost to the vastness of the cavern above. The ferryman’s head snapped back, but Gull kept firing. The second. 31 caliber bullet struck Charon in the chest, as did the third. The fourth struck the ferryman’s shoulder as he collapsed, spilling over the side of the boat.
He never fired the fifth round. Gull waded in to catch the creature — the myth — before he could slip into the water and be swept away. He holstered his weapon and drew out a khanjarli, a curved Indian dagger perfect for his purposes. He wrapped his arm around the ferryman’s head, unwilling now to look at the face hidden beneath that hood, and plunged the dagger into Charon’s throat, cutting flesh and muscle, grinding the blade against bone.
The ferryman’s head tumbled from the hood and splashed into the river.
"Oh, for fuck’s sake," Hawkins said, from up on the riverbank.
Nigel Gull let the body slip into the river. Even as he did so, the current caught the boat and it began to float away. Gull caught the prow, the lantern swinging, throwing that sickly yellow light back and forth. At last he turned to look at his operatives, there on the shore. Both of them watched him wide-eyed, Hawkins still standing over the unconscious Eve, and Jezebel hugging herself even more fiercely than before.
"What do we do now?" he echoed, staring at the girl. "We bloody well improvise."
CHAPTER TWELVE
There was a forest in Hell.
Ceridwen knew that this ancient Underworld was not the equivalent of the Christian hell, that it was a repository for all the dead souls of its age, not merely those considered damned. Yet its subterranean nature was enough to force comparisons to all Arthur had told her of damnation. Caverns and flame, barren landscape… and yet it was not entirely barren.
The Cyclopes had engraved his map on stone. They could not possibly carry it, but Ceridwen had no trouble committing it to memory. Weakened as she was, she was still capable of that much at least. While the caverns continued to slope downward, luring them farther from the surface world, the Cyclopes had suggested a quicker route to the River Styx, though the blackthorn forest. It was treacherous territory, a broad expanse of hard-packed earth from which grew grove after grove of twisted, unnatural trees. Their trunks and branches were thin and ebony black, ridged with dagger-sharp thorns.
Danny led the way through the blackthorns. Ceridwen had been hesitant at first. An elemental sorceress, she had a rapport with nature in Faerie, and had always taken for granted how easily she adapted to the nature of Arthur’s world, the Blight. But here she was cut off. The environment was so unnatural that her innate connection to the world around her was disconnected here and it sapped her strength.
She could not feel the trees. Could not touch or sense them. The blackthorn groves were to her like the ghost of a forest.
This was the path they must take. That knowledge had given her the strength to forge ahead, to ignore her trepidation and move amongst those deadly branches. Danny went first, his skin more durable than hers or Arthur’s, and searched for the easiest passage. He blazed the trail and Ceridwen followed. Arthur brought up the rear in silence, but Ceridwen understood. Ever since they had descended he had been attempting to make sense of this place, to understand what Nigel Gull’s purpose here was. Now that Eve had been taken, he was even more haunted. He prided himself on his powers of perception and observation. They were sorely tested here.
Ceridwen paused a moment and blinked. There were places in the Underworld where it was light enough to see easily, but here there were only shades of gray and sometimes the path among the trees was difficult to spy. She pushed back her linen hood and it coiled around her throat. Where was the boy?