Chapter 6
The woman clutched the edge of the hallway as if to hide around it. It was a useless gesture. She was thin, but there was simply no place to go.
I was pressed against the wall myself. I manifested enough courage to unglue my ass and did my best to ignore the spiders on the floor. My pained face must've been obvious because the woman in the white dress giggled. I was a regular comedy act down here.
I cleared my throat. "It's nothing," I said, trying to sound tough. "Don't be afraid. They're just spiders."
She didn't move and I figured it was me she was afraid of.
"I'm Cisco Suarez. What's your name?"
She blinked at me. "Are you lost?"
"I guess I am," I answered in a jovial tone. "You can come out. I won't hurt you."
She smiled but her eyes were still tense. I beckoned with my hand. She glanced behind her before easing away from the wall.
Her nightgown was a lot more formal than I'd expected from the Nether. It covered the length of her legs, only revealing bare feet when she stepped ahead. Her waist was wrapped in a corset which left her shoulders bare. Her arms were skinny and undernourished, and her face was one that could've been pretty but circumstance had made plain. Her long black hair was straight but tattered, thin as a thread. I couldn't put my finger on it. Something about this woman was sad.
"I get lost too, sometimes," she said. Her skin and dress were smudged with dirt. I couldn't blame her, down here. Hell, I'd just gone for a dip in a swamp.
"What about now?" I asked.
She looked over her shoulder again but didn't answer.
One of the spiders on the floor got too close and I kicked it away.
"Don't do that!" she exclaimed. She hurried forward on her haunches. The woman cupped her hands around the black spider and then produced it in her palm. I grimaced. "It's a living thing, with its own job to do."
Yeah, like freak me out. She must've seen my discomfort because she set it down at the edge of the cavern. "It's special in its own way. All of us are. Each with our own story."
I couldn't tell if that was an invitation to ask about hers. Can I read women or what?
She watched my befuddled expression and gathered the confidence to approach. She was tall. I mean, not Throok tall, but she met me eye to eye. I wondered if she was human. Slim odds, down here.
"You don't talk much," she deduced.
"I keep up an inner monologue."
She smiled and wiped dirt from her cheek. There were lines of grime under her short fingernails. The woman had the mannerisms of a child but, even though I couldn't place her age, was much older than that. As I considered her, we heard panting sounds coming from the passage and she glanced behind her.
What now?
"Grettle," came a nasally voice. A man appeared in the opening she'd come through, but he was anything but. He was a faun. Half goat, half man. This was beginning to feel like a chapter of
Alice in Wonderland
.
Shorter than the satyr, more hunched over, the faun's winding ram horns made up for his loss in stature. He had shaggy, brown goat-legs with cloven hooves, a bare torso except for tufts of hair on his shoulders and forearms, and wore a leather skirt and belt. You see what I mean about clothes in the Nether?
Unlike the satyr, the faun's face was less human. Not completely goatlike, but animalistic, with a flattened nose, orange eyes with those freaky goat pupils, and exposed fangs. He flicked his pointed ears when he saw me and stroked his goat beard. His other hand held what looked like a cross between a hatchet and a boomerang, carved out of bone.
"You can't run off like that, Grettle," he chided. The faun approached us warily. He clamped a clawed hand around the woman's arm and pulled her away, never taking his eyes off me.
"Now wait just a minute," I said.
"For you?" he chortled. "Not a chance."
"Be nice, Orpheus," said Grettle.
Orpheus. Grettle. Ceela. Throok. Nether names.
Orpheus snorted, but it didn't carry the gravitas of the minotaur's. "You're a human, aren't you? What are you doing in the Margins?"
"I have my reasons."
He nodded absently, looking up the other passage and then considering the rabbit hole. "Where is she?"
I waited a beat. "Grettle?"
"Not her, human. The satyr. Where is the satyr?"
I scrunched my eyebrows. "Is this some kind of hypothetical riddle?"
"Never lie to a trickster, human. Fauns are the masters of lies. Are you alone down here?"
"Yes," I answered truthfully. "Just us and the spiders." Grettle smiled.
"Then we have you outnumbered," he taunted.
I didn't know if he meant the spiders or something else. I preferred the something else.
"Back away, Grettle," he said, shoving her toward the passage.
"But—"
"I said back away. I can handle the human."
I laughed. "You can
what
?"
The faun tapped his hatchet against his black hooves to shake dirt away. "This doesn't need to go bad for you, human."
"The name's Cisco."
He narrowed his eyes. "Just tell me where the satyr went and we'll leave you be."
"
We
," I repeated. "Is that word used differently in the Nether? Because topside it means more than one person."
Orpheus snorted again. "So be it." He threw the boomerang at me.
Chapter 7
The first thing I did was wonder: who uses boomerangs?
My second action was more pragmatic. I lunged to the side as the projectile spun past me. There was a heft to it, I could tell, because of the wind that buffeted me as it went by.
The faun leaned forward in anticipation. I hate to disappoint everyone, but I'm no amateur. I knew that boomerang was coming back around for me. I turned and flicked my hand at it, sending a twine of shadow to wrap it up.
The boomerang sliced right through my magic like butter. Maybe I'd be called the dairy witch from now on.
With only a second to spare, I phased into the darkness just as the projectile flew at me on its return trip. I was fast enough, but it still caught me. Instead of whiffing right through me, the boomerang rapped against my head, pulled me out of the shadow, and knocked me on my ass.
Orpheus caught the weapon with ease and chuckled. I pushed to my knees and faced him with a scowl. There were spiders all over the floor, but at least they were staying away from the big boys. A tickle in my hairline concerned me. I patted the dirt off my hands and rubbed my head just above the temple. It came away with blood.
"Had enough, human?" he taunted.
"You kidding? You don't win a fight with one lucky shot."
Orpheus relaxed his features. "This is what you call a fight topside?"
I did my best Throok impression and growled as I stood. I didn't have seven feet but I was a couple heads taller than this runt. When I came at him, though, he didn't look concerned.
Orpheus now held his weapon like a hatchet, swinging it in his hand. I feinted and stepped away, wary of diving back into the shadow. My guess was his weapon was enchanted. Strong enough magic could hit me when I hid in the darkness. In those situations, it was best not to hide.
I stepped into his next blow, raising my left arm as the hatchet crashed into it. Blue light flared, but the Norse protection tattoo along my forearm held stronger than full plate. I didn't feel a thing.
I had another tattoo on my palm that could manifest a shield of energy. That one was meant for small projectiles, like bullets. It wouldn't do jack against melee weapons, so I was stuck in hand-to-hand combat.
I punched Orpheus in the face with said hands. He recoiled in shock and I went for another. The faun lowered his winding horns, and the impact nearly broke my knuckles.
Orpheus rolled his weapon arm away from my armored arm. I devoted both hands to keeping the hatchet at bay, and that's when he hit me. A cloven hoof cracked into the side of my knee. I dropped halfway to the ground, to his height. Orpheus spun around, and this time the hoof barreled into my chest. I crashed to the floor again, hacking up spittle.
The short faun cracked his shoulders. "Another lucky shot, I suppose."
My leg hurt. If it wasn't for the magic fortifying my body, my knee would've shattered. This time when I stood, the sound I made was more of a grunt. Less anger, more pain.
The faun considered the rabbit hole. "It's against the Table for younglings to venture to the other steppes. She didn't go overground, did she?"
"Who?" They say a sucker's born every minute. Better than being a snitch, I suppose.
The boomerang flew at me again. I slipped into the shadow, but this time I used it for speed. I dashed to the side quicker than my body could've managed, escaping the path of the hurled weapon. I solidified in a crouch. The boomerang circled around and came back for me.
Instead of moving, I reached into the shadow on the floor. My hand pushed down, into the darkness, like the dirt was a liquid surface. When my hand emerged, it was wrapped around the sawed-off shotgun that I stored in the ether. It was an old piece, a breech-loading model with a single barrel, but I was a good shot. I raised the weapon, waited a beat for the boomerang to bear down on me, and fired. The birdshot erupted from the shotgun and sent the boomerang into the wall and clattering to the floor.
"Huh," said Orpheus with a scowl.
I smiled as I ejected the shell, reached into my belt pouch, and loaded another round. This one was an original creation I call fireshot: birdshot rounds opened up and modified with orange spark powder. You don't practice black magic in Miami without picking up some voodoo tricks. Shadow magic is good and all, but sometimes you need a bigger punch.
A sharp whistle escaped the faun's lips. I raised my sawed-off at him, but little creatures flooded in from the passage before I could call him off. Little men, humanoid, shorter even than Orpheus. Three feet max. These bad boys had large heads, gray skin mottled with warts, and crooked, disjointed features. Patches of their withered skin were hairless; other sections that weren't meant for it were hairy: knuckles, elbows. They were clothed in rags and twigs and leaves and were generally disgusting. Awful thing to say about an entire race of creatures, but there it was. Their gray skin and yellow eyes tipped me off to what they were: spriggans.
Slaves and underlings to higher fae, spriggans weren't silvans themselves. They didn't resemble humans or animals—they were more like little goblins—and they were shit at magic. Not a single one of these ragged sleeves had a trick up it, but there were a lot of them. Ten, fifteen, and more streaming into the room. With those numbers, claws and teeth start becoming extremely tactical.
And unfortunately, my one-shot-at-a-time sawed-off wasn't gonna cut it in these conditions.
As the room filled with the ugly fuckers, they proved me right. No formation, no talking—they just charged straight at me without pretense.
I fired my shotty at the nearest two. Half of one's head exploded and the other erupted in flames. The fire startled the horde and backed them away. I dropped the gun to the floor and it submerged in the shadow. Then I went into my pouch and retrieved a small sack of powder that I upturned into my open palm.
Powder might be a bad word. Bone dust is more accurate. Not just dust, either. You don't get access to industrial grinders in the boonies so the stuff was pretty chunky, like gravelly sand. Add the six intact water moccasin fangs and you can probably deduce how I came about the source material (and why I don't have any snake zombies).
Keeping my bottom palm flat, I slapped my other into it, not unlike a gator chomp. Dust clouded the air like I was clapping two chalkboard erasers together. I waved my arms around, going for a good spread.
The spriggans weren't smart enough to hold back and the shock from the fire blast had worn off, so they came at me again. At the last second, I scattered the remaining chunks and fangs from my hand, gripped my over-sized skull belt buckle, and called the cottonmouths.
The bone dust and snake teeth were ignored by the vicious fiends for the first few seconds. After that, ignorance was impossible.
Shadows creeped and slithered. They entwined with each other and curled apart. And when a spriggan loomed too close, the shadows even struck.
One, two, three fiends went down, struggling against invisible foes. In the meantime, I piled on. I manifested a hammer of darkness and batted little men away from me. When they scratched, I shadow punched them. Bones splintered in sickening crunches. More often than not, the spriggans would get back up.
The wave pushed at me. They were too stupid to check themselves, and they paid for the blind attack dearly. It takes a lot of energy to solidify the darkness into a weapon, but faced with gruesome death, you find the energy. I battered the little men till their black blood gushed. After a second hit, they were slower to get up. After a third, they could no longer make that choice.
And the snakes didn't let up either. They weren't enormously dangerous to most, just spirits really, but they wreaked havoc with the spriggans. As the cloud of bone dust widened, so too did its effective range. And stupid or not, eventually reality comes knocking and morale turns.
The spriggans scattered. The look of fear on their faces said it all. By my count, I should've halved their numbers, and wounded more. Only new ones continued to spill from the Nether passage.
Usually fights clear out a room. Other times they attract an even larger audience.
Chapter 8
I had to move. Nothing inspired confidence more than reinforcements, and the snake dust was about to settle on the ground and snuff out.
I darted for Orpheus, kneeing a spriggan in the face and barreling over him. The faun was a coward now, pushing his underlings into me, hiding behind them just as he'd instructed Grettle to do with him. I hesitated in frustration, knowing the loss of action could be my undoing. In battle, you need to alter your strategy based on enemy actions. You can't always react, but no plan survives first contact. I turned to the rabbit hole and wondered if I should retreat instead. After all, I didn't have a dog in this fight.
Orpheus saw my consideration and barked for his underlings to cover the exit. Ten more spriggans rushed into the chamber. Thirty of them standing now. Ten covering Orpheus. Ten on the exit. And ten going on the offensive.
I'd never seen this many fiends at once before, let alone fought them, but at least they were split up. I sneered and considered my odds. With spriggans, getting dirty's inevitable.
I cloaked my fist in shadow. As the first minion came at me, my punch launched him into the air and over the heads of his allies. I bowled the next one over too. When the claws threatened, I phased past them and reset my location a few yards away. Suddenly behind a couple, they didn't see my blows coming.
They crowded around me. I manifested a tendril of shadow and caught a spriggan around the neck. It hissed as I dragged it away, choking it out. And that's when I felt the teeth.
One of the smaller ones had managed to clamp onto my leg with gangly arms. Acting on reflex, I slipped into the shadow. Some things can prevent that once they get ahold of me. Not spriggans, though. They're too small. Too ineffectual at magic. But that didn't mean my flesh vanished from between her teeth. I slipped away from the others and rematerialized, but the small spriggan had come along for the ride.
I winced as her teeth ripped deeper into muscle. I ran my hand through my hair, coating my palm in fresh blood, and cupped the little beastie's face. Blood magic sizzled her flesh. She roared and flung herself away from me, still smoking. Honestly, the bubbly skin was an improvement.
But her friends were uncowed. They replaced her in line like I was giving away free autographs. Fine by me. If the little fuckers wanted blood, I would give it to them.
I pulled my knife from my belt. It wasn't menacing and couldn't match the damage of Throok's kukri or even Orpheus' boomerang-hatchet. That wasn't its purpose. The knife was ceremonial. A curved blade of bronze with intricate ornamentation. It was a spell token. An implement of black magic.
I slashed the blade across my upper arm and opened a small gash. I know what you're thinking: why use my blood when I could use theirs? But Netherling blood is black and spoiled. It's a vile substance that doesn't conduct the Intrinsics properly. Makes you wonder where silvans get their juice from.
I pooled the red essence in my hand and flung it at my attackers. It burnt like acid. Only minor damage, maybe, but it turned their screams up a notch and caused their ranks to panic. I scooped up an errant cottonmouth fang from the floor. Newly armed by fresh blood, I threw it at a particularly beefy spriggan. The tooth embedded into his neck, and his already-gray skin went black as the magical venom did its work.
Something hammered my back and forced me to my knees. I spun and barely ducked the second swing of a club wielded by an unusually resourceful spriggan. This guy stood out because his clothes were less moldy than the rest. King of the peasants, over here.
He took his club with two hands and swung it overhead. I didn't want to rely on shadow since I was afraid there was something special with the weapons down here, so I blocked the attack with my armored forearm. The flare of blue bedazzled my opponent. It was the last thing he saw, unless you count my ceremonial knife. It slid right into his eye like a plump tomato and the spriggan immediately collapsed.
Sometimes, magic's overrated.
The unsheathed knife didn't wanna let go of the eyeball and I had nasty flashbacks of kebab night. I wiped the blade clean as the spriggan ranks increased. The rabbit hole had a full twenty guarding it now, and several of the ones I'd downed were fighting through the pain and getting back up.
In retrospect, Orpheus hadn't been kidding about the whole "we" angle. He had his own personal army.
Luckily for Ceela and Throok, it was a spriggan army. Too weak to venture outside the Nether, without the magical chops to conceal themselves, and lacking the fortitude to survive overground. The one thing I knew they wouldn't do—
couldn't
do—was follow her outside.
Which was exactly why they were blocking my exit. They didn't want me to escape either. I should've shifted right through them when I had the chance. Now, the shadow couldn't carry me through that many of them.
I considered the underground passage that Orpheus hadn't come from. To be honest, I liked that option even less. Wandering through the Nether was like following will-o'-the-wisps. More likely than not you'd end up a cautionary example in someone's fairy tale (and I'm talking the original ones with the dark endings).
But there was a third option. Orpheus. He was the key to it all.
I blinked through the shadow to shake the spriggans engaging me. Orpheus locked his animal eyes on me first. Behind the pack of spriggans, he thought he was safe. But shadows follow everybody.
I snaked a tendril from beneath the faun and wrapped it around his horns. When I pulled, my shadow snapped like a rubber band. Orpheus barely jerked his head.
And that's when I got it. The faun's winding horns had a surface of elaborate patterns. Intricate, almost like spellcraft. Except it was innate. Natural. The horns were the source of his power and immune to my shadow magic. His boomerang must've been carved from the same material. I guess voodoo animists like me haven't cornered the market on using the dead.
My steps toward Orpheus were determined. I rammed a bowling ball of darkness ahead to clear the way. I skipped through the shadow—left, then right—keeping the fiends guessing as to my location. Right before my final jump, I gripped the cut on my arm and squeezed thick blood into my palm. I wiped it on both hands and prepared my spell. The shadows took me, and before anyone knew what had happened, I materialized behind Orpheus and grabbed him by the horns.
The warm blood on my hands was a conduit for my power. It smoked and crackled as it contacted the silvan's horn, but I locked my grip like a vise. I yanked his man-goat head so far back Orpheus almost fell over, but he steadied as he felt the tip of my bronze blade at his throat.
"Call off your army," I said, "or I'll cut your horns off and sell them on the black market."
The faun grimaced and I heard a gasp. Behind me, Grettle had her hand over her mouth. She wanted to say something, but Orpheus held up clawed fingers and the activity in the room ground to a halt. The horde of spriggans fell silent save for scattered moans from the fallen. Grettle took a step backward into shadow.
"Don't do anything stupid," said Orpheus.
"Clear the way!" I commanded. Left hand on the horn, right hand on the knife, I dragged him toward the rabbit hole.
The faun glowered. "My people will never forgive any harm against me."
"Do I look bothered?"
"I don't mean the spriggans, human. I mean my kin, the Circle of Bone. I am a baron in their ranks. A great benefactor."
I rolled my eyes. "You sound real important. Tell your grunts to clear the way if they want to keep being benefacted."
He growled and I yanked his head back further. I wasn't certain he was completely helpless—silvans are renowned for their trickery—but he seemed to play things safe at least. He nodded to the crowd of beasties guarding the exit, and they grumbled and stood aside.
The blood on my hand popped and my palm began to burn. I clenched my jaw and gripped Orpheus tighter before spinning us both around to address the room. "I'm not here for a fight. I don't care about fauns or satyrs or underground holes. If I don't see another spriggan or minotaur for the rest of my life, I'll be a happy man."
The faun twisted his scruffy lips into a smile. "Who said anything about a minotaur?"
I paused, realizing he hadn't mentioned that part to me. By the slowly darkening complexion of his face, it was obvious he hadn't known.
"A minotaur?" he growled, incredulous. Orpheus shook in my grip and my hand smoked. His power was burning off my magic at a fast clip. Soon I wouldn't be able to hold him down. That's what I got for talking.
"Settle down!" I barked, jerking him to the side. A brave spriggan crept too close and I split his nose with an alligator boot. At the far end of the room, Grettle held her breath as she watched us.
My voice softened. "You can come with me," I told her.
"Like hell," said Orpheus, narrowing his eyes. "You think we're subservient to wizards down here? Our people are warriors, as stout as any trickle of power you possess."
"Quiet," I said, staring at the plain-faced woman.
Grettle blinked her lost eyes and a line formed on her forehead. Then she shook her head and backed down the tunnel.
"Grettle," I called.
Orpheus chuckled. "Don't be forlorn, human. You will see us again, if you so wish."
"If I see you again I'll mount your head on my mantle." What? Everglades hideaways could have mantles.
The faun sneered. "Human, I am the great Orpheus. Your insults I can concede to ignorance, but your threats will be met in kind." He twisted his head and spat on the floor. "The Nether knows you now."
The heat on my left hand increased. "That's all right. I don't plan on coming back." I addressed the crowd again. "Now, here's what's going to happen. I'm gonna go topside. Any faun or spriggan or even spider that follows me out will be met with deadly force. Is that clear?"
The horde of fiends shuffled listlessly as if they couldn't comprehend the situation. It's not like they could go out anyway. And Grettle was gone.
Orpheus, for his part, chuckled deeply, almost as if I no longer mattered. My hand gripping the horn was shaking now, knuckles white with effort, and my palm began to sear like a rib eye.
I pulled up right to the exit, put my boot to his backside, and kicked the baron to the ground. He halted his laughter at the affront, but the smile never abandoned his face.
"You are known to us now, human," he repeated. "You bear my mark."
I wiped my aching hand on my jeans and then upturned it to see the magical swirls from his horn branded into my flesh, right on top of my palm tattoo.
Orpheus boomed loud with laughter. "A night, a day. It matters nay. A pox, a curse, sealed with a verse. That is the Nether promise."
Hell, I didn't like the sound of that at all.
Shakespeare over there didn't move, but the horde of spriggans closed in. I vaulted backward into the rabbit hole, through the magical portal between steppes, and once again tumbled on my ass.
It was undignified, but I was back in the Everglades.
I rolled back into the grass and scooped my shotgun from the shadow. With the speed of a trained soldier, or at least an inebriated one, I loaded the first shell I fingered and stabbed the sawed-off toward the tree and the not-so-harmless nook between its roots, waiting for something—anything—to emerge.
The short barrel jerked back and forth unsteadily. The right hand wasn't the wounded one, but something much more primal than a contact burn was causing my arm to shake.