Tithe to Tartarus: The Dark Avenger's Sidekick Book Three (Moth & Cobweb 6) Read online

  TITHE TO TARTARUS

  The Third Book of the Dark Avenger’s Sidekick

  A Tale of Moth and Cobweb

  John C. Wright

  Copyright

  Tithe to Tartarus

  John C. Wright

  Castalia House

  Kouvola, Finland

  www.castaliahouse.com

  This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission of the publisher, except as provided by Finnish copyright law.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used in a fictitious manner. Any similarity to actual people, organizations, and/or events is purely coincidental

  Copyright © 2017 by John C. Wright

  All rights reserved

  Editor: Vox Day

  Cover: Scott Vigil

  Version: 001

  Contents

  Cover

  Chapter One: The Mask of the Foxmaiden

  Chapter Two: The Lair of the Vigilante

  Chapter Three: The Face in the Glass

  Chapter Four: In Darkest Night

  Chapter Five: I Am a Sneaky Fox

  Chapter Six: Hastilude

  Chapter Seven: The Cauldron of Youth

  Chapter Eight: The Treasure Room

  Chapter Nine: Fire and Shadow

  Chapter Ten: The Lass from Elfland

  Chapter Eleven: The House of the Dead

  Chapter Twelve: The Devil’s Own Door

  Chapter Thirteen: The Gem of Memory

  Chapter Fourteen: Who Speaks Words in Elfinland

  Chapter Fifteen: Ne’er Sees More His Own Country

  Awake in the Night Land

  Young Man's War

  Castalia House

  ‘O see ye not yon narrow road,

  So thick beset with thorn and brier?

  That is the Path of Righteousness,

  Though of it few inquire.

  ‘And see ye not yon broad, broad road,

  That lies across the lilied leven?

  That is the Path of Wickedness,

  And leads away from Heaven.

  ‘And see ye not yon bonny road

  That winds about the ferny height?

  That is the Road to fair Elfland,

  Where we must go this night.

  ‘But, Thomas, ye shall hold your tongue,

  Whatever ye may hear or see;

  For who speaks word in Elflin-land,

  Ne’er sees more his own country.’

  —Traditional

  Chapter One: The Mask of the Foxmaiden

  1. Nightfall over the City

  It was dusk in Manhattan, and Yumiko Ume Moth sat atop the Chrysler Building combing and braiding her shining hair of raven-black and brooding blackly on vengeance.

  For now, at long last, out of the mists of amnesia, Yumiko finally knew the truth about her mother’s murder.

  Yumiko knelt atop the spire. The crown was seven radiating arches mounted one atop the other, clad in stainless steel. Below her was the observation platform on the 61st floor of the Chrysler Building. Gliding weightless, she had followed a flock of pigeons riding a rising thermal to reach that height. Here, impressive Art Deco eagles glared out in all directions, facing Central Park, Times Square, Grand Central Station, and the East River. In the bay was the Statue of Liberty.

  The sun in the west was smothered in clouds as orange as flame. The towers of the city were bright on one side, dark on the other, and threw long, horizontal shadows across the rectangular texture of lesser buildings. Windows running up the western sides of long-shadowed skyscrapers shined like upright swords whose mirrored blades reflected the pyres and burnings of conquered castles.

  These lofty buildings were below her. Only the Empire State Building was taller. No workingmen had died in the construction of the Chrysler Building, and so Yumiko had no need to worry about ghosts.

  She knelt atop an arch in her skintight gray supersuit, with black opera gloves and thigh-high boots. Snugly about her form was cinched her weapons harness with all its pouches, sheathes, and holsters. There was no wind; the air was still.

  Yumiko did not know the elf-trick of having hair braid itself, and so it had been hanging down to the small of her back in a ponytail. The long ponytail was only a bit in the way of her quiver, only mildly likely to be snagged as she swung from rooftop to rooftop, and only partially inviting for an enemy to grab while wrestling to twist her head into a helpless posture.

  She frowned and combed and brushed and frowned, wrestling with memories of sorrow and loss and trying to gather the scattered threads of clues and plans into a single braid.

  One tiny fissure in the black wall of her amnesia had parted, and one glimpse alone had been shown her. She had recalled strange sights of ironclad airships flying the black flag of anarchy attacking a walled city in the clouds, Sarras, from which the sacred and ruby-red Grail by robbery was ripped. Yumiko’s mother Dandrenor, the Grail Queen, had died at her post.

  Yumiko knew that Winged Vengeance, a survivor of Sarras, sought revenge against the Anarchists who had arranged that attack. She had been his sidekick and disciple before her memory loss. He alone truly knew who and what Yumiko was and had been. But now he mistrusted her and cursed her as a traitor.

  Despite his mistrust, following a clue she provided to him, he had visited one of the secret strongholds of the Anarchists, the innocent-looking nightclub run by the magician Wilcolac Cobweb and called the Cobbler’s Club. She had seen him there, a man about town in top hat and tails, not a shadowy vigilante in his celestial flying robe of black.

  The Supreme Council of Anarchists were seven men, or creatures, who took the days of the week as code names. Yumiko had discovered Lord Thursday to be Lucien Cobweb, the chief of a pack of werewolves, who were being smuggled into New York City by the hundreds. When the number reached one thousand, the wolves would emerge, immune to any weapon of man, and fall upon the city in slaughter and blood.

  Two things opposed them: one was Winged Vengeance, who was hunting and slaying the Anarchists. The other was the Last Crusade, who were hunting and slaying the werewolves.

  Lucien, the Lord of Wolves, working through the magician Wilcolac, had attempted to win the aid of the Last Crusade against Winged Vengeance. The Last Crusade consisted of Sir Gilberec Moth the Swan Knight, a young man whose tongue could speak with animals but could not speak untruths, and Matthias Moth, a Dominican novice and exorcist, whose eye could see ghosts.

  Their third member, Tom Moth, an apprentice inventor, was missing.

  And he was apparently Yumiko’s fiancé. Or something of that sort. She was in love with a young man of whom not the slightest memory remained in her mind. She had lost even the memory of her loss.

  But Lucien had also hired Sir Garlot the Red, a knight of Elfland, possessor of the ancient and potent Cloak of Mists, to challenge and kill Sir Gilberec once he was of no more use to them. This same Sir Garlot had abducted and imprisoned Yumiko’s only friend and ally in this world, her scatterbrained cousin Elfine. Garlot was keeping the fairy girl in a bottle in his treasure chamber.

  Yumiko had been working in the Cobbler’s Club in disguise as a waitress, dancer, and hat-check girl. This allowed her to place bugging devices in Wilcolac’s phone and tracking devices in the hatband of Winged Vengeance, the collar of Sir Gilberec’s dog, and the he
m of the cloak of Sir Garlot.

  Eventually her raven-black hair was braided and gathered into a snood, which was tucked, in turn, into her cowl. But by that point, her mood was lighter. Her next step was clear. She had placed the threads carefully. Now it was time to follow where they led.

  “I must be a vain girl after all,” she muttered wryly, smiling for the first time. “Any reasonable adventuress wears a bob or pixie cut.”

  Night had fallen. She donned her fox mask.

  2. Electric Spoor

  She took the time to check carefully each control in the mask, discovering features she had not noticed before or not remembered from her previous life, including how to turn on the airtight seal and the oxynitrogen supply.

  To her delight, she found one of the settings of the eye lenses would superimpose a stereoptic gridwork and a dot of light on her view to give her the distance and direction to each tracer currently being tracked. A second feature opened an inset map. A third feature could allow status-alert lights from her electronics to appear in the corner of the her view and open status messages.

  Yumiko summoned the inset map into the lenses of her goggles. The city spread below was overlaid with a grid of green lines. She confirmed that the tracer zero-five, the one she had hidden in the hem of the misty cloak of Garlot, was close at hand, in Central Park. Apparently, Malen’s brother had gone home to Is-Elfydd.

  Rescuing Elfine might be a quick matter for a girl who could turn invisible. Yumiko spread her wings and launched herself into the night. Central Park was one long block away past Rockefeller Center and Carnegie Hall. The Chrysler Building was tall enough for her glider to carry her into the park, past the zoo and the meadow and the lake. She landed silently in the upper branches of a tree.

  She twisted the ring to summon enough mist to render her invisible. Gliding and swinging from tree to tree, she came to the baseball diamonds of the Great Lawn.

  Yumiko studied the little green numbers twinkling in her view as she peered down from her perch, wishing the suit had come with an instruction manual or that she could remember exactly how it worked.

  Then she realized. One number was longitude. One was latitude. The third was elevation. It was a negative number. Yumiko had been maintaining the hope that perhaps Garlot’s treasure chamber was in a tower or treetop mansion. That thread of hope snapped. The tracer was below ground.

  Yumiko twisted the ring back and forth, hoping against hope. When she twisted the ring until the band was shining black and the face in the intaglio that of a desiccated corpse, the tall hills crowded with monoliths rose above her, and the impossible mile-tall trees rose above that. The whole landscape seemed strange and out of proportion, as if objects both near and far were no longer obeying the normal geometric rules of perspective. But no gateway to the buried city was visible, and she could not recall under which hill it stood.

  Before, when Malen had led her into this version of the scene, no watchmen had been seen. Now she saw what seemed to be corpses impaled atop sharpened posts of extraordinary length. The poles were gathered thick as reeds and spaced in a circle at the feet of the prodigious trees.

  As one, all the bodies raised their heads. The empty eyes fixed on her. The pressure of their gaze smote her heart; a coldness like a flock of myriad needles tickled and pricked her limbs. The jaws of the empty mouths opened, and a cry of shrill misery, rising and falling, filled the air.

  High above her, emerging from glass and jasper towers and stronghouses perched among the tall and thick branches of the impossible trees, now strode forth shining elfs in armor bright as silver, carrying bows and bright spears, and with the light of arctic stars gleaming in their eyes.

  A silver trumpet sang: the note of music was so beautiful that it made her feel faint and elated, as if she had been injected with morphine. It was a soporific, benumbing. She twisted the ring to its pewter setting.

  She could no longer see the trees, but the sound of the fair horn and the cold terror in her heart from the eyes of the dead still gripped her.

  She retreated quickly. Her panicked heartbeat did not slow until she was perched atop the Chrysler Building once more.

  Yumiko was surprised at the sensation of helpless anger. At first, she could not put it into words. It was not just that the trail led underground, where she could not follow. There was a touch of deep sadness, and of longing. She wanted strong arms about her, the arms of a protector she trusted, a man smart enough to outwit even the elfs in their ancient, ageless scheming and to surprise them.

  Then the mingled thoughts and feeling came clear. Tom would have known what to do. Tom would have built or stolen a burrowing machine and simply dug down there, guns turrets blazing. That he was the type to put gun turrets on a burrowing machine, she had no doubt.

  She cherished this thought. It was like finding a fragment of a page torn from a lost volume of a missing library. But the library containing all her thoughts, feelings, ideas, traits, triumphs, and losses was lost.

  3. A Magic Shop

  The next closest tracer was zero-six, the one she had placed on the top hat of the Japanese gentleman at the club, named Pooh-Bah. She suspected that this was not the real name of Winged Vengeance, who she knew to be of the Peaseblossom clan. It did not sound like a real Japanese name. Maybe it was Ainu?

  In any case, she needed his help and now had more to tell him. How she would overcome his suspicions, she did not know.

  She followed the signal to a spot between Lexington and Park Avenue. Here was a shop with three golden balls over the door. We Fix It! one gleaming neon sign declared. AL_ HOURS _PEN! flashed the red sign above the first, in blithe contradiction of the boast below.

  Other hand-printed signs were thumbtacked to the door. Restorer of Reputations. Astrology. Palmistry. Love Philters. Checks Cashed. Souls Pawned.

  Finally, there was a small brass plaque on the door. We Are Many, Proprietor.

  When Yumiko peered through the smaller of the two windows, she saw what looked like a cluttered museum. Here were long-eared and spike-nosed goblin masks, skull-masks, and wolf-masks, and there were whips and chains and an iron maiden. An idol of Shiva, blue as a corpse and dancing on the back of a cowering dwarf, was on a pedestal midmost, and in each of her eight hands she held a weapon. There were mummified skulls hanging from the ceiling, inverted crosses and pentagrams, a stuffed alligator with a human head, and other things more grisly or disgusting.

  The other window was larger. Here on display were a cabinet for holding a sleepwalker, a glass tank into which a wax dummy in a straitjacket was suspended by his feet, and a box on sawhorses for sawing a lady in half above a heavy grating meant to catch the blood. In the far corner of the window display was a wax dummy in a tuxedo, a wand in his hand. On his head was the top hat from which the tracer signal came.

  From this second window, she could see the rear of the gloomy, unlit shop. There sat a shape dressed like a Franciscan friar. The hood hid the upper half of the mummified face. Its lips were sewn open into a wide clown-grin, displaying teeth of black iron. It sat on a seat shaped like a metal rib cage, with steel skulls adorning the arms. Behind this throne was an old-fashioned door of dark planks waxy with age with three huge hasps of wrought iron and a doorknob of blood-red cut crystal that glittered like ruby. It was as tall and wide as a gate.

  Oddly, it was not the corpse of the friar that made Yumiko’s heart contract with fear and sent nightmarish, shapeless images of horror swimming behind her eyes. It was this tall door. What it meant—and where it went—she did not want to know.

  She felt the evil gazes before she saw them. Fear like an ice-cold blade pierced her. The human-headed stuffed alligator was looking at her, as were the long-eared South Sea Island masks, the shrunken heads, and the statue of Shiva. The wax dummies had not moved, but now their painted eyes seemed alive, piercing her. The sleepwalker in the cabinet was not a wax dummy, for it had turned its head toward her without opening an eye, and held at a tilt
as if listening.

  And an intuition or a buried memory told her of the delight Winged Vengeance took in leading anyone seeking to follow him into traps and dead ends or into the arms of enemies worse than he. She knew that this was a place of power of some dark and malign entity. Whatever was inside this shop was worse than any elf of night.

  This was a second dead end.

  She twisted the ring on her finger, became weightless, and shot her wirepoon pistol overhead.

  Perched on a flagpole many blocks away, she panted, doffed her mask, and mopped her brow. Did her old master think he could outsmart her? She may have forgotten her lessons, but her quality of character was surely the same.

  Donning the mask once more, she tuned to zero-one, the tracer she had left in the octagonal room in the ruined church, where she had made contact with Winged Vengeance not long ago.

  A warning light blinked amber, red, amber. Out of Range.

  She had not known the tracers had a range.

  4. A Vanishing Chamber

  Twenty minutes and two miles later, she was down Fifth Avenue and past the Empire State Building, a block from Madison Square Park. Within an unlit area surrounded by cedar trees rose a square tower of red brick beneath a roof of tarnished copper. She landed on the roof between pale, weather-worn statues of saints and sought the window she had entered before.

  She pulled the lopsided shutter open and saw nothing. She clicked from one lens setting to the next. Tossing her head to retract her mask, Yumiko drew and pointed the narrow, powerful beam of her flashlight within.

  Vertigo touched her. She had been expecting to see a floor a foot or so below the sash, and on the floor, a table with a phone inside an eight-sided chamber. The table was not there. The floor was not there. The chamber was not there. Instead, she saw a dusty, empty space like a well, plunging down past the reach of her flashlight beam. The wheels and rafters from which church bells once hung were above her head, and the old chains, corroded with disuse, dropped down beyond sight.