The Furies (17 page)

The crowd parted to make way for the guards. Conroy took the lead, and all eyes in the room fixed on the woman he carried, focusing first on Ariel's injured legs and then on her desolate face. It was difficult to read their reactions—some people seemed sympathetic, but most seemed confused. Then Conroy passed by and everyone shifted their attention to John, looking him up and down. Their reactions to him were crystal clear: they glowered in outrage. He had no right to be here.

The guards turned to the right and passed through a doorway to an even larger space, an immense cavern with walls of rough stone and a rocky ceiling that arched a hundred feet overhead. It was a natural cavern that the people of Haven had obviously modified for their own use, building structures and terraces and pathways within the chamber and installing elevators that connected it to the surface. To his left John saw a pair of concrete structures, each five stories high, that resembled office buildings. To his right was an industrial-looking building with many crisscrossing pipes that extended across the cavern and delved into its floor. Fixed to the cavern's walls were powerful arc lamps that flooded the space with bluish light. Dozens of men and women strolled along the pathways, moving from one building to another.

Gower walked beside him on a pathway that ran the length of the cavern. Conroy and Archibald were just a few yards ahead, but the chamber hummed with so much mechanical background noise that they were out of earshot. John decided to risk asking Gower a question. “This place is amazing. How many people live down here?”

The young man grinned. He seemed pleased by John's interest. “Ah, let me see. I believe there are almost one thousand nine hundred Furies in Haven at the moment. I'm not counting Sullivan's Riflemen in that number, nor the Rangers who are currently on assignment.”

“My God, that's incredible.”

Gower nodded. “Our family has grown considerably. When the Elders came to America, there were only twelve people in their party.”

“Wait a second, when was this?”

“They arrived in Boston in 1646. But they didn't stay there. They began searching beyond the colonies for a place where they could live unnoticed.”

“Beyond the colonies? What do you mean?”

“They left New England and came to the Great Lakes, which were just starting to be explored. The Elders discovered this cavern during their wanderings and decided to locate their farm near its entrance. Everyone lived aboveground at first, because the area was a true wilderness then. The only people nearby were a few Ojibway clans.”

Ojibway.
That was the name of the ferryboat he and Ariel had hijacked. “That's an Indian tribe, right?”

“The Elders had an excellent relationship with them. The Ojibway left us alone and we did the same. But in the 1800s the white settlers flooded into Michigan, and there was a danger they'd become too curious about our community. The Elders recognized that if they wanted to keep their secrets, they had to make themselves inconspicuous. They had to hide their growing family.”

“Is that when they started building all this stuff underground?”

“Aye, they built the first dwellings in the cavern then. Later on, they added larger structures for our libraries and laboratories and machine shops. Nowadays we need only a few dozen people to remain aboveground to work the farm, but most of us go outside at least once a week to get exercise and fresh air.”

“And you pretend to be Amish whenever you're on the farm?”

He nodded. “It's a suitable disguise for us because Amish communities keep to themselves and have little contact with the outside world. If we run into any outsiders when we're on patrol, we shy away from them and speak with each other in the German dialect that the Amish use. Our chain-link fence is a bit unusual for an Amish farm, but our neighbors understand that we value our privacy.”

John thought of the fenced-off cornfields he'd walked past just a few minutes ago. “And you need the fence because you're also guarding the entrance to the cavern. Which is big enough that you can hide a whole city from the world.”

“That's not all.” Gower pointed at the industrial building with all the pipes. “This cavern is geologically active. The churning of the earth below us produces heat, and our geothermal plant uses the heat to generate electricity. We don't need to be connected to the state's power lines, so we appear to be similar to other Amish communities, which traditionally don't use electricity from public—”

Gower's voice had been rising as they spoke, and Archibald overheard him. Scowling, he looked over his shoulder at Gower, who immediately stopped talking. Archibald scowled at John as well, for good measure, then faced forward.

The pathway led to a large building at the very center of the cavern. Constructed from massive blocks of gray stone, the building was shaped like a pyramid, rising so high that its point nearly touched the cavern's ceiling. The entrance was triangular, and the stone walls were inscribed with the same runes John had seen in Ariel's notebooks. The guardsmen opened a pair of heavy bronze doors and then marched down a long, dark hallway. As soon as the doors closed behind them, all the mechanical background noise ceased. Except for their rapid footsteps, the hallway was silent. Then another pair of doors suddenly opened in front of them and they entered a huge, grand room with a white marble floor.
This must be it,
John thought.
This must be the council chambers of the Elders of Haven
.

John had to blink a few times until his eyes adjusted to the light, which was much brighter here than in the cavern. He noticed that the room had an odd shape: the floor was square, but the walls were triangular. They leaned inward to form a pyramidal space that mirrored the overall shape of the building. Each wall was covered with a mural, a gorgeously colored painting of muscular men and beautiful women in old-fashioned dress. But as John looked closer he noticed something disturbing. The men in these murals were slaughtering the women. In one painting, a mob used torches to light a pile of wood under a woman tied to a stake. In another, a priest looped a hangman's rope around the neck of a teenage girl. In the third mural, an executioner swung an ax at a woman sprawled on the chopping block; in the fourth, a woman with a millstone around her neck sank beneath the waves while the men onshore pointed at her.

It took John a second to figure it out. These were pictures of the genocide that Ariel had described, the mass killings that swept across Europe four hundred years ago.
The massacre of the witches.
The images were so shocking that John just stood there, mouth agape, while the guards marched ahead. Gower had to tap his shoulder to get him moving again.

The council chambers were laid out like a courtroom, with a judge's bench on a dais at the front of the room and a central aisle running between several rows of seats for the spectators. The bench was empty except for an elderly man with a long white beard, who stood at the left end of the dais. Conroy hurried down the aisle until he reached the front row, and then, with an exhausted grunt, he lowered Ariel into one of the seats. Gower and John followed them to the front of the room, but Gower didn't allow John to sit. He had to stand between the front row of seats and the dais.

Meanwhile, the old man with the long beard shuffled toward Conroy. The two of them conferred in whispers for a fairly long time, maybe half a minute. Then the geezer turned around and went through a doorway to another room. John guessed he was the Elders' bailiff, the guy who ushered people in and out of the chambers. And sure enough, the old man reappeared about a minute later, leading three red-haired women toward the bench.

Because John stood so close to the dais, he got a good look at the three Elders. The first in line was short and pinkish and fat. She wore a silky green dress that showed off her ample breasts, which bulged and wobbled just below the plunging neckline. The woman behind her, in contrast, was tall and thin and wore a long-sleeved, high-collared, jet-black dress that covered nearly all of her very pale skin. She seemed ghostly, weightless, so insubstantial that a light breeze would blow her to pieces, and she stared straight ahead as if in a trance. But it was the third woman who really caught John's attention. She was small but athletic, with strong, sinewy arms and long, fiery hair. Even before she sat down in the central seat behind the bench, John knew this had to be Chief Elder Elizabeth Fury, Ariel's mother. The resemblance was striking. You could've almost mistaken mother for daughter, if not for one crucial difference. Elizabeth's left eye socket was empty. A thick ribbon of scar tissue ran down her forehead to the empty socket, then continued across her left cheek to her jawline.

John winced and turned away from her, looking instead at the short, buxom Elder. But now he noticed that this woman had deformities too—one of her ears was mangled, and she was limping as she took her seat to the left of Elizabeth. And when he focused on the pale, thin Elder seated to Elizabeth's right, he observed that one of her hands was actually a wooden prosthesis. He remembered what Sullivan had said about the Elders: all of them were more than five hundred years old, and Elizabeth was more than a thousand. Although they didn't age, they weren't immortal. They could be cut and bruised and broken and burned, and though they could treat themselves with powerful herbal medicines, some of their wounds would never heal. When he studied the women more carefully, they didn't seem young at all.

Once they were seated, Elizabeth fixed her gaze on John. She didn't look at Ariel, even though her daughter sat less than ten feet away and was clearly injured. The Chief Elder's lone eye, green and wary, shone on him like a spotlight. Her face was surprisingly emotionless. Unlike the other residents of Haven, she didn't seem outraged by John's presence. Instead, she seemed calm and businesslike, coolly determined to get to the bottom of the matter. After several seconds she turned to Conroy.

“I'm ready to hear your report, Master of the Guardsmen.” Elizabeth's voice was different from Ariel's—deeper, harder. She pointed at the white-bearded bailiff, who stood at attention in the corner of the room. “Old Sam says you encountered my son as well as my daughter?”

Conroy approached the bench and bowed in her direction. “That's correct, milady. It pains me to report this, but Basil was torturing—”

“Nay, don't call him by that name.” She shook her head. “He no longer has the right to it. Call him by the name he's taken.”

“Aye, milady.” Conroy bowed again. “Sullivan was torturing Lily and her paramour when we came upon them. It seemed clear that he intended to murder them, so I gave the order to fire. We slew four of the Riflemen, but your son escaped with the others.”

Elizabeth's face was still impassive but John got the sense that she was struggling to rein in her emotions. She took a deep breath and turned to Ariel. “Are you all right, child?” Her voice softened. “How badly did he hurt you?”

Ariel bit her lower lip. She, too, seemed to be striving to maintain her composure. “The worst injury is to my legs. The Riflemen shot me during the first ambush, in Brooklyn two nights ago. I assume you saw the media reports about the incident? There must've been stories on television and in the newspapers.”

Her mother nodded. “The news reports mentioned the name of your hotel and the fact that none of the victims of the shootings could be identified. We deduced that Sullivan had attacked you.”

The buxom Elder sitting to Elizabeth's left leaned forward. John noticed, to his surprise, that her plump chin was quivering. “And what of
my
sons?” she asked. “Did either of them survive?”

Ariel shook her head. “I'm sorry, Aunt Margaret. Hal and Richard died while defending me. They were badly outnumbered, but they fought valiantly to the end. Their actions brought great honor to the Ranger Corps.”

For a moment it looked like Margaret would start crying. But instead she pressed her lips together and pointed at Ariel. “And what have you brought back from your assignment?” She wasn't really pointing at Ariel, John realized. Her finger was aimed at the small leather-bound notebook resting in Ariel's lap. “Do you have the information we requested from Caño Dorado?”

Ariel held the notebook above her head. “Everything is here. Sullivan tried to take my Treasure, but he was unsuccessful.”

“Well, what were the results of the experiments? Did Mariela find the catalyst?”

“Auntie, please. You know the agreement we made. This information was entrusted to me alone.”

“I don't need all the details, girl!” Margaret's face reddened. “I'd just like to know if the results were worth the sacrifice of my sons!”

“Enough.” Elizabeth raised her hand for quiet. “Sister, we can discuss this at a later time. Right now we have a more pressing matter to consider.” She pointed at John but kept her lone eye fixed on Ariel. “Lily, what happened between you and your paramour? Do you realize how unnatural this is, to have an outsider standing before our council?”

Elizabeth's contempt was so obvious, it made John grimace. Feeling a surge of adrenaline, he strained against the rope that tied his hands behind his back, but he couldn't loosen it. “You think I wanted to come here?” he shouted. “You really think—”

“Silence!” The command came from Old Sam, the white-bearded bailiff, whose voice was unexpectedly loud. “If you utter another word, we'll gag you!”

John didn't care. They were going to kill him anyway, so what was the point of obeying? He was just about to tell the whole Council of Elders to go fuck themselves when Ariel turned his way and gave him a pleading look, mouthing the word “stop.” Then she turned back to Elizabeth.

“Mother, it's Sullivan's fault. He broke his oath and revealed our secret because he wanted to hurt me. It was part of his torture.”