by Tad Williams
But the guy with the booze was interrupted before he could finish his spiel, shoved rudely out of the way by something very large that loomed above me like an arriving bus. The newcomer was female, in an Alice’s-Duchess sort of way. In short, she looked like a bitter manatee in a wig.
“Git,” she rumbled at the gin peddler. “This fine gennulman don’t want your swill. He wants a little of the good times, eh? Eh? Am I right?” She leered as she bounced her breasts in her ragged bodice. They looked like plastic bags of pale gravy and blue spaghetti. “Nothing like what I’ll give you for a spit, lordship. I’ll clean your gulleys and gutters, I will. Blow the ashes right out your chimney!” She hiked up her skirt to show me what was under the dress. If a hairless horse had as many legs as a spider, with a cruel parody of female genitalia at the juncture of each sagging, scarred pair of thighs, then . . . no, you don’t really need to know. It was all I could do not to vomit. “Oooh, lovely,” she said, reaching for my prick.
I suddenly realized I was naked. I mean, really realized. I turned and dove into the crowd, for the moment not caring what other horrors I was rubbing against.
“Asswipe! You won’t find any prettier between here and the Uppers,” she bawled after me, cantering awkwardly in place as the bodies of her fellow Hell-citizens pressed back around her. “What you think, that you’re one of the high boys? Go on and find out what they’d do to you, you stuck up little turdball!”
I had to keep moving, I now understood, because when you stopped, things started to crawl on you. So I pushed on through the crowds, through the filth and the howls and the unending horror-zoo, past things that cringed from me and things that snapped at me, past beggars by the dozens with raised hands like mutant starfish, begging, pleading, weeping tears of blood and other unpleasant liquids. Everybody was scarred. Everybody was crippled, and not in accidental ways—these were punishments. It should have become easier to take after a while, the constant flow of maimed creatures, the hopeless and the inhuman, but it didn’t, and wouldn’t for a long time. I picked up a large rock and carried it in my hand, just to have some kind of a weapon.
Still, as I fought my way through the crowd in search of a way out of this level, or at least a place where the shoving crowds weren’t so terrible, I saw that there were things happening here in the labyrinth of Abaddon that had nothing to do with me, or even with punishing people: makeshift shops with actual workers, taverns, houses, and other signs of civilization, however grotesque. I confess I was surprised. People actually lived here in Hell. They sold things, they struggled to be able to eat and sleep safely. But where were the punishments? Not the punishment of simply existing in all this hateful, overwhelming squalor, but the actual punishments?
Then it struck me, and of all the ugly things I had experienced since stepping off the Neronian Bridge, none hit me harder. This horror around me wasn’t what Hell was really like. Not by a long shot. Lameh had said something about the levels of Abaddon being in the upper parts of Hell, not up where the lords of Hell like Eligor and Prince Sitri made their homes, but not the deeps either. In levels far below us in the great darkness, in the worst of the boiling heat of which this was the merest balmy outskirt, where the souls I had heard on the bridge were made to scream those mind-freezing screams, that was where the real Hell lay. Horrible as this place was, an insult to every sense, a horror to every thought—still, by infernal standards I was in the pleasant suburbs. And if I were captured, I would never see anything this charming again.
At that moment I came very, very close to simply giving up.
Lameh’s mind-whisperings had helped me with some of the geography of Hell but hadn’t given me anything like a detailed idea of how it all fit together, let alone an actual map. In fact, I doubted there could be such a thing, outside of a few broad strokes, because just during the short time I’d been in Abaddon I’d seen a half-dozen passageways made and destroyed. The place grew and changed constantly, like a living organism, a coral reef or something, although the work was done by demons and damned. Between one lamp and the next, a road became two or was filled in; houses were built on top of other houses until they all collapsed, then more were built atop the rubble. Entire neighborhoods caught fire or were shaken down by the intermittent tremors, only to be rebuilt in different form for new inhabitants, often right on the still-screaming bodies of the injured. And they might keep shrieking that way forever, because death can’t release you if you’re already dead.
I had a couple of places I needed to go, but no idea of how to get to them, except that they were both somewhere above me in the great stack of infernal levels. And if you think it’s hard to get directions in a strange city, try Hell. Actually, no, don’t bother.
No map, no directions. How was I going to do what I had to do?
As it turned out, Abaddon had an answer for me.
I was standing in a sewage culvert at the outskirts of one of Abaddon’s maze of settlements, staring up at a depressingly familiar piece of outer wall when it happened. I was exhausted and frustrated, because I had just realized I’d checked out this area the previous day. In other words, I’d got lost again. It seemed I’d have to hike the whole circumference of the place to find a way out, which might take years just on this level.
Something brushed against me and lingered longer than it should have. I didn’t hesitate—I didn’t want to be attacked or solicited—so I swung my arm hard at whatever was touching me. I heard a grunt and something tumbled to the ground at my feet, felled far more easily than I would have expected.
I looked down and saw a very small shape huddled below me in the churned, excremental mud of the street, a naked creature not much larger than an organ grinder’s monkey, hard to separate from the muck underneath. Passersby were stepping on it as often as over it, some of them huge, some of them with hard hooves. I could hear the little thing squeaking, not like something crying but like something desperately trying to catch a breath, so I steeled myself, reached down, and yanked the little bundle up onto its feet. It was only as I turned away again, this small humane act completed, that I saw that the little whatever-it-was held my weapon-stone in his long-fingered hands. The little fucker had picked my pocket, and I didn’t even have a pocket.
I snatched back the stone, then pulled the thief into an eddy of the crowd where I could look him over. He had big, round eyes but hardly any nose, his limbs were shrunken and bent with what in the normal world I would have taken for the aftereffects of scurvy, and he was matted all over with pale hair. He was surprisingly strong, though—I had to keep a tight grip on him to keep him from squirming away. The wide-mouthed, primate face betrayed an intelligence that was enough like my own to make my borrowed heart sink inside my borrowed breast.
“You stole my rock,” I said.
He tried to look innocent, but succeeded only in looking more than ever like something that was going to pee on your rug as soon as you turned away. “Nuh,” he said. “Didn’t. Lemme go. Bilgebark’s calling.” His voice was high-pitched, like a child’s.
“Who’s that? Who’s Bilgebark?”
His dark eyes went even wider. He was astonished by my ignorance. “The minder, he is, the big hand, big man. Around Squitters Row, anywise. He’ll come after, I’m not back to the works by afters.” Something about the way he spoke made me even more certain he was a child. His eyes kept darting to either side, and although he’d quit fighting, his muscles were still tense in my grip. If he couldn’t convince me to let go of him, this kid was going to do something to get free, probably something violent, but he was going to try to talk his way out first. I liked that. “What’s your name?” I asked.
He slitted his eyes as if I’d blazed a flashlight in his face. “Don’t got one.”
“What do you do? Where do you live? Do you have a family?”
The eyes crept wider still at this, as though he was having trouble keeping command of himself in the face of such bizarre questions. “Don’t got one. Live a
t the works.” He licked his lips, then asked nervously, “You Murder?” He saw I didn’t understand. “Murder Seck?”
It finally dawned on me that he was talking about the Murderers Sect, armed demon guards who functioned like mercenary soldiers. In the more built-up areas they were pretty much Hell’s police.
“No. Not me,” I said. “Not Murder Sect, just . . . ordinary.”
He tried something new. “Let me loose. Gotcher rock back, yeah? And I bite.” He showed me his grin, which was indeed made up of surprisingly clean, even, pointy little teeth, like you might see in a fish or a frog.
But I wasn’t letting him off that easily. “I need someone to help me find my way out of here.” It was a risk to trust anyone, even a child, but I’d run out of other ideas. “I’m lost.”
The little monkey-boy considered. Although I could see he was genuinely thinking about it, I could tell he wasn’t ready to give up on just running for it, either.
If you learn to hide your tells better, I decided, you’re going to be good, kid. But then I thought Here? and Compared to what? and the whole idea suddenly just made me really sad.
“Three spits,” he said at last.
Once he started to bargain I knew I had him. We settled on a deal where I’d feed him while he was with me and give him an iron spit at the end, when I found my way out of this level of Abaddon. I didn’t have a spit, of course, but I’d find a way to change that somehow.
“This way,” he said, and headed off without looking to see whether I was following.
I stayed alert as the kid began to lead me out of Abaddon, in case he was actually leading me to his big friend Bilgebark, who would then beat me to death and relieve me of my prized rock. That was if you could get beaten to death in Hell, which didn’t fit in with what I knew about the place. Of course, children in Hell didn’t really make sense, either. I was depressingly sure I had all kinds of disturbing new experiences in front of me.
The kid and I didn’t talk any more. He seemed to like it that way. But Monkey-boy kept sneaking glances in my direction as we walked, as if still trying to make up his mind about me. Dogs don’t like direct eye contact, and lots of other mammals (including some humans) don’t like it either, so I just kept looking forward at where we were going, at the endless passing parade of distorted bodies and unbearably various faces.
“Got one,” my companion said at last. He was no longer looking at me, but staring resolutely ahead just like I was.
“One? One what?”
“Name.”
I considered this for a moment. “And what is it?”
“Gob.”
I nodded. I almost said, “Nice to meet you,” out of sheer habit, but realized that probably didn’t get said a lot around here. Although the street around us was as disgustingly, stenchfully crowded as before, and just as noisy, there was a different quality now to the silence between the kid and me. Something was settled, at least for the time being.
I had made my first friend in Hell. Sort of.
fourteen
sinners for sale
MY EYES were burning and I was spitting out foul dust. We had been climbing through termite-nest dwellings on Abaddon’s outskirts for a few hours, miles of piled mud, filth, and broken stone, but still hadn’t found a way to the next level.
“How far until we get out of here?” I asked.
“Baddon? Dunno.” Gob contorted his small face into a mask of thoughtfulness. “Never been to the very uppest of it. Long. Far.”
I cursed. Swearing in Hell seemed a bit like coals to Newcastle, but it was an old habit. “And what’s beyond?”
“Highwards?”
I decided he meant “upward.” “Both ways, if you know.”
Gob seemed to have decided I was some variety of harmless crazy. It didn’t make for loyalty, but like most children, even immortal ones, he was game to hang around as long as things interested him. “Down below Baddon, that’s Airbus. Black all the time. Don’t go there.”
Erebus. The highest of the Shadow Levels. Lameh had given me enough information to know I definitely wanted to steer clear. Erebus was where the serious mayhem began, the levels of torment and despair. “Above?”
“Above Baddon? Dunno. Think next is Asdull Medders, where the Sinner Market is.”
I perked up a little. Archangel Temuel’s errand was to someone named Riprash who worked at the Sinners’ Market, which meant that Gob must be talking about Asphodel Meadows (a place which, even though it was in the middle levels of Hell, was probably going to be much grimmer than its charming little name). For the first time I felt a little hope that I might actually accomplish something useful. Caz would almost certainly be with Eligor in the uppermost levels far, far above us, in Hell’s equivalent of Park Avenue. But if I found Riprash I could discharge my obligation to my boss and maybe even get some help. “Gob, could you help me find my way to the Sinners’ Market?”
The kid looked me up and down. With his straggly hair, scrawny limbs, and massive eyes, he looked like an anorexic PowerPuff Girl. “Maybe. Cost you another spit.”
“Sure.” Since I didn’t have a single spit to give him at the moment, I had no problem promising a bonus.
“Thinking ’bout it,” he said as I got wearily to my feet.
He was a hard, cold little thing, my guide. I’d been poking bits of information out of him as we traveled through the narrow, crowded byways of Abaddon. As it turned out, unlike most of Hell’s inhabitants, Gob really had been born here. Hell’s citizens broke down into three basic types: the Neverborn, who were angels and other high beings condemned here by God; the Damned (which kind of speaks for itself as a category); and the small leftovers called Ballast. Gob was one of these, a child whose mother had been sent to Hell while he was still in her belly. She had, by some unpleasant linkage of their souls, given “birth” to him here, surrounded by screams and horror-mask faces, then later wandered off to explore her own damnation. Ballast—the extra weight in the hold of a ship, something nobody bothers to save when the vessel is sinking. That was Gob. He’d grown up motherless in the anarchy of Abaddon’s filth, with no family but the overseer who bossed him and his little fellow thieves and murderers. As I was coming to understand, though, Gob had something the others didn’t. Not kindness, or even concern for anyone else—that doesn’t really grow in Hell—but I think maybe curiosity.
He was a strange kid, by any standard. Each night, whenever we determined it was night, he made a bed for himself in the same animal way, lying down in dirt or weeds or even prickling nettles, which he scarcely seemed to notice. First he would sniff (he could never explain why, except the spot had to smell “right”) then he would lie on his side, knees to his chin, and slide and roll around until he had made a little hollow of whatever was underneath him. Then he’d arrange himself back into the original chin-to-knees position, close his eyes, and fall asleep as quickly as it takes me to say it. Sometimes when Gob slept he made little animal sounds, wordless whimpers and choked squeals that in his dreams or memories might have been full-throated screams. I tried not to imagine what kind of things chased him in his sleep.
When he was awake he was pretty entertaining too, in a sad sort of way. He jumped at any noise as if he had heard a gunshot. When we stopped to rest during daylight hours (if you could dignify the sullen red light with that name) Gob didn’t really sit down or relax, but just perched on something or stood and waited impatiently for me to get moving again. He didn’t try to convince me not to rest, but he didn’t like pausing during the day. Always aware, always shifting his body in small ways to watch his surroundings, constantly ready to run away or fight, he reminded me of some of the things I’ve seen about African child soldiers, little boys who had gone pretty much from their mother’s breasts to committing random homicides.
Hell must be a lot like being born in the middle of a war, I decided: there was no chance for anything better to develop. I could almost imagine Gob as a little machine, a thi
ng that had survived intact this long because it did exactly the right things and would keep doing those things even if it was miraculously transplanted into some other situation, like San Judas. I’d known a lot of street kids, but almost all of them had something that showed they were human, a shallow loyalty to each other if nothing else. Hell must grind that out of everyone, I decided. What relationship could survive being worn away over thousands of years of big and little torments?
Hell is a big cylinder. Imagine somebody dug a hole down into hardened lava, all the way down to where it gets squishy and murderously hot again. Now, remember those cake tins Grandma Flossie used to send you at Christmas with ugly-ass fruitcakes in them, year after year? Take a near infinite number of those tins and stack them in the hole on top of each other, so the bottom is in molten goo and the top of each tin is the bottom of the next. That’s pretty much the infernal layout. There are cities on every level but also lots of wilderness roamed by bandits, monsters, and worse stuff. Remember, it’s Hell, so they made it big. Even with the more enlightened sentencing laws of the last hundred years or so, it still has to hold billions upon billions.
And I had to get to the top, or near it, to reach Caz. I knew there was a sort of elevator system—they call them “lifters”—that ran right up through the middle of Hell’s layers like the string of a necklace, but that was like knowing there’s an elevator in Montana when you’re on the Oregon coast. The famous rivers of Hell, Styx and Acheron and the others, also provide a way to travel, but first you have to be near a river, which we weren’t. So at least while I handled my boss Temuel’s errand, I had to make my way up through Hell one slice at a time. Even with Gob’s help, it took a couple of days just to find our way to the next level of Abaddon.
