Beneath the gleaming skyscrapers and picturesque façade of the City of Redemption lies another city; a community of dark and ancient magic populated by creatures of the night. 

Strephon Bellman, a semi-immortal half-fae, is attending a meeting of the City’s Hidden Council, when he learns that his secret adversary has taken action against his friend, Miss Cassandra True.  In a fit of rage, Strephon seizes Inanna, the personal assistant to Lord Melchior and also secretly an agent for the mysterious mastermind.  He compels Inanna to take him to her master.

Dark Redemption  is an Urban Gothic Fantasy which will be running in weekly installments Wednesday evenings.  Previous installments can be found linked at the  Dark Redemption Index.

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Chapter 65:  The Belly of the Beast

In Which Strephon finds himself in the dark

Strephon's first sensation was pain.  Pain in his hip, pain in his knees, pain in his ankles.  It felt as if every bone from his hips on down was screaming at him.  He had fallen and landed badly.  He didn't think he had fallen far, but with his mortal legs as old as they were, any landing was bound to be a bad one.  He tried to shift to a more comfortable position.  Big mistake.  The attempt sent new volleys of pain ricocheting through his legs.

He opened his eyes.  No, his eyes were already open.  Then why in blazes couldn't he see anything?  The ocean of abysmal darkness which engulfed him seemed just as black whether his eyes were open or closed.  And the more he tried to peer through it, the more the darkness seemed to press against his eyeballs.  For a moment, he wondered if he had been stricken blind, like the Assyrians in the Old Testament.  Then common sense reasserted itself.  The lights had simply gone out.

Where was everyone else?  He had been in the Council chambers, standing before the Council Stone, the center of magic in the city.  He remembered opening the envelope Inanna had given him the day before, which she said would summon the Wild Hunt.  It contained no such thing.  Just a jeering message:  SHE IS DOOMED.

He had lost his temper.  And worse than that, he had behaved in an ungentlemanly manner.  And although he wasn't entirely certain, he thought he might have transformed himself.  Such metamorphoses were not uncommon among the Fae, but Strephon was not in the habit of doing so himself.  He could not clearly recall what he had transformed into, but he had a dreadful fear that he had made a spectacle of himself.

First things first.  Strephon drew his attention inward to assess the damage to his legs.  His faerie half would heal by itself pretty much instantly without his attention, except for damage caused by certain specific items, such as cold iron or hawthorn wood or the like, and most of those he was immune to anyway, but his mortal limbs were still susceptible to the slings and arrows that flesh is heir to.  He couldn't even use magic to, for example, cure the arthritis in his knees.  His legs would have to heal naturally.  But there were other things he could do.

As he feared, his right hip was dislocated.  Not an insurmountable problem, merely an uncomfortable one.  He summoned his magic to gently force the femur back into its proper place.  In practice, the procedure was more forceful than gentle, but it needed to be done.

Next he addressed his legs.  He had feared they might be broken, but to his relief he found only a minor fracture in his left tibia.  He conjured up a splint to hold the bone in place and support the leg.  It reminded him of back during The War, (the First World War, that is), when Phyllis had been working with the local Red Cross and would dragoon him into being a helpful subject on which to demonstrate first aid techniques.  That had been a lot less painful.

His ankles, now they were pretty much a lost cause.  He wasn't sure how much damage they might have suffered.  The best he could do for present was create some ice around them to reduce the swelling and a cast to immobilize them.  That would have to do for now.

That just left the pain, which in some ways was the easiest to fix of all.  Although the pain was coming from his mortal limbs, it was being perceived by his brain and as Gilbert (curse him!) observed, he possessed a fairy brain.  It was childishly easy to magically block the pain, but he preferred to leave this as a last resort.  Perhaps this was a vestige of puritanism lingering from his religious upbringing, perhaps it was sheer stubbornness, but there was a practical aspect to this as well.  He liked to say that pain was Providence's way of telling him, “That thing you did?  Don't do it again!” Because his legs were so frail, he needed to be aware of when he might be over-stressing them.  The pain was a useful reminder to be careful. He compromised.  He cast a magical veil over his pain so that it would not distract him, without making his legs totally numb.

Now, where did his other crutch go?  One of them remained clamped to his forearm.  That's right. Tobias and his father had grappled with him, trying to restrain him, and the elder Mister Simms had torn one of the crutches off his arm.  He owed both of them an apology and hoped he hadn't hurt either one.  Putting both hands on the handle of his crutch he hefted himself up to an upright position.  It took some grunting and no small amount of profanity, but he managed to get back on his feet.  A spasm of dizziness overcame him for a moment, but it passed fairly quickly.  It was not the most comfortable of positions, but from here he could attempt to take his bearings.

The darkness seemed no less impenetrable than before.  “Hello?” he called peevishly.  “Is anybody there?”  But the silence of the chamber seemed almost as absolute as its darkness.  Well, that in itself proved that wherever he was, he was no longer in the Council Chambers.  If he were still there, he would have heard a torrent of voices:  worried voices asking what happened to the lights, angry voices demanding that somebody do something and wondering what they paid their rates for; the sound of Chairwoman Vane's gavel banging and her shrill calls for order.  Instead, all he heard was the sound of his own heartbeat, and a faint whimper, like someone sobbing.

But he could sense the magic about him; lines of mystic force converging on a spot just under his feet, just as they had when he stood before the Council Stone.  He must still be in the Chambers.  What's more, the Council Chambers had been sealed.  He shouldn't have been able to leave them.  It had been foolish of him to command Inanna to take him to her master.  But he had evidently gone someplace.  Where?

Strephon began to pick out shapes in the darkness. He could not see where the light was coming from, but looking down he could see his hands on the crutch and the torn remnants of his jacket.  He must have transformed into something beastly.  And over to one side of him, he saw Inanna, crouched on the stone floor.  Her Elizabethan finery seemed dull and faded in the dim light of the faerie fire, giving her the aspect of Cinderella after the ball, kneeling in the wreckage of her shattered pumpkin and abandoned by her six white mice, without even a simple glass slipper for company.  She did not look his way.

A gleam in the darkness caught his attention, perhaps a dozen or so feet ahead of him.  It expanded into a pool of light, like that of a dramatic spotlight, centered on a massive desk with a jet black surface like a slab of onyx.  On top of the desk rested a set of colored egg-shaped paperweights arranged in a circle.  Paperweights!  Of course, there would be paperweights.  A large figure sat behind the desk in an imposing leather chair.  The figure sat just outside of the light, so Strephon could see little of him, save for a large hand resting on the gold-colored paperweight and the sleeve of a grey pinstripe suit.

“Good evening, Mister Bellman,” the figure said in a deep, sardonic voice.  “I have been expecting you.”

The figure leaned forward into the light, revealing a broad face with a meticulously pointed beard and a smile like a knife.  It was a smile he's seen before.

NEXT:  Pieces Come Together