by Tad Williams
I stared at him, my head just about emptied by all the kinds of scared I was. “Well, what?” I said at last.
“You said you had something to tell me. We’re alone. I’ve got the others taking that drift of slaves down to the dock. So tell.”
I closed my eyes for a second in a silent prayer of gratitude. Now I only had to hope that Temuel’s seemingly innocuous message wasn’t some kind of code for “kill the guy who tells you this.” I tried to look Riprash in the eye to show him my sincerity, but I just couldn’t do it. All that exposed meat, and the chunk of ax still in there . . .
“I’m not from here,” I said, looking attentively at his massive feet. “I’m from . . . somewhere else. Do you know what I mean?”
Riprash made a low noise. “Could be,” he said at last. “Could be I don’t. Say what you got to say.”
“A friend asked me to find you and give you this message. He said, ‘You are not forgotten.’ That’s all. Just that.”
Nothing happened, or at least nothing that registered down in the area of Riprash’s size sixty-three tootsies. I looked up. Not all at once, but I did it.
He was crying.
I’m not joking. He was. A single glowing tear like a streamlet of lava had made its way down from his good eye across his cheek, and now dangled like maple sap from his chin. “All thanks,” he said, almost whispering. He sagged forward like an ancient redwood collapsing, and to my astonishment he landed on his knees, then lifted both massive arms above his head. “All thanks. I am lifted.”
You can guess what I made of this, which was nothing useful. Riprash stayed that way for a while as more tears dripped from his face and made bright little splashes on the floor before they cooled and faded. I was beginning to feel less terrified than embarrassed, he was so clearly in the grip of something deep and personal. Since he hadn’t smashed me into jelly over the message I’d just delivered, he was still the closest thing Gob and I had to an ally, so I sat tight as it went through him like a storm and made him shake all over. At last it was done. Riprash wiped his good eye with the back of a massive hand then climbed back onto the rock again.
“Ah,” he said. “Ah. That was good to hear. All thanks to you—” He paused, his brow fissuring as he realized. “I don’t know your name, master.”
“It’s Snakestaff.” This was the first time I’d told my demon cover-name to anyone but Gob, and I was watching to see if it meant anything. I only had Temuel’s word (and Lameh’s silent memories) that it hadn’t been used before. But the ogre didn’t seem to find it either surprising or familiar.
“My thanks, then, Snakestaff. May you be lifted.”
Which sounded better than most things that had been happening, so I nodded. “Okay, now what?”
He looked at me like a man woken up too quickly. “What? What do you mean?”
“I mean, do you mind if we get on our way? My servant and me? Thanks for hiding me from the commissar, but I have other errands I need to do in Pand—in the Red City, and that’s a pretty long walk.”
“Other errands?” He looked interested, but not in the cruel, hungry way you usually see demons look interested. “Others like me?”
“No.”
“Too bad that you have to go. You should meet some of the other Lifters. Your message will mean a lot to them.” His terrifying face grew almost cheerful. “Wait! I am bound to deliver those slaves to the commissar at Gravejaw. If you go with me on the Bitch you’ll travel much faster, and you can find a lifter when you get there. That should speed your journey to the Red City.”
All this talk of lifting and lifters and bitches had me boggled, but I was not going to look this particular gift ogre in the mouth. “You mean you’d really help me?”
“I would do any service I could.” He spoke with a strange weight to his words. “Can’t you guess what your message means to me and mine?”
I couldn’t, not really, but clearly it meant a lot, and I was going to do my best to ride that wave all the way to the beach. “Yes, of course.”
“I ask only one favor in return.”
Shit, I thought, here it comes. Does he want to drink some of my blood, or eat one of my eyes? “And that is . . . ?”
“Tonight you must come with me to fellowship.”
Not quite as bad as I’d feared, obviously. “Certainly. But I still don’t understand. How will you get me to Gravejaw so much faster than I could walk?”
He laughed. “By boat, of course—my ship, The Nagging Bitch. Otherwise it would take you a hundred lanterns or more. But on Cocytus’ broad back, we’ll be there in nine.”
Well, thank you, nasty, foul river, I thought. I guess you’re not all bad.
Obviously, I still had a lot to learn.
The fellowship meeting, as Riprash called it, took place in a spot so disgusting it’s a miracle I remember the actual meeting at all. You’ve never really been in a sewer until you’ve been in a sewer in Hell. This one was made of what looked like mud brick, and smelled like . . . well, there just are no words for it. If I hadn’t been wearing a demon body, I suspect my sinuses would have committed suicide on first contact with that nose-scorching odor of death and shit and shit and death.
Still, bad smells were nothing compared to being caught by one of the gangs of Murderers Sect guards who patrolled the waterfront, so Riprash’s fellowship meetings were always held deep in the tunnels. It was ridiculously crowded with two dozen of us perched on the edge of a drainage culvert, but everybody just squeezed up as close as they could, because even in Hell, even among those being punished for all eternity, nobody wanted to go splashing around in that stuff.
I really did find it kind of touching that all these condemned souls as well as the demons meant to torment them (damned only outnumbered demons in that sewer about three to one) should come together in search of something bigger and better than what they knew. And Riprash himself, as it turned out, impressed me even more.
He was clearly the main dude, at least here in Cocytus Landing, and it showed. When he began to speak, even the poor damned guy covered entirely in shivering porcupine quills did his best to be quiet and listen.
“Once upon a time, back in the World, there was this fellow named Origen.” Riprash pronounced it like an Irish name—O’Ridgeon. “And he had a big idea: Nobody has to stay damned forever. Nobody.”
A few of what must have been the newer members of the congregation looked startled and whispered to each other.
“That’s right.” The ogre spoke slowly, as if for children. “Not even the Adversary himself has to remain in Hell for eternity. Even he can lift himself up. Lift himself up! And so can we.”
“But what good will it do?” demanded a creature with a head like a skinned donkey. “Those angel bastards will just push us back down anyway. They’ll never let us out!”
A few others murmured their agreement, but Riprash was clearly an old pro at this sort of thing, and tonight he had a better than usual answer.
“If you think so,” he said, “then you’ll be very interested to hear the message this fellow brought to me today.” He pointed at me and several of the creatures in the sewer turned to look. “He brought me a message from,” he dropped his voice to a near-whisper, but even an ogre whisper was pretty loud, “from that other place. The up-high place. Where those angels live who you think only want to push you back down. And what did the message say? What did the message sent all the way down here from the other place say, Master Snakestaff?”
He was clearly waiting for me. “‘You are not forgotten,’” I quoted.
“That’s right! So think of that. I don’t say that all the Halos love us, because they don’t. But there are some as know what’s done to us wasn’t right. And if we keep trying to do it, well, we can lift ourselves up, just you wait and see!”
Riprash went on like this for a while more, then asked if any of the fellowship wanted to give testimony. I had thought I would be bored and restless, as I would have be
en in any religious meeting back on Earth, but instead I was fascinated. The first one to speak was a damned soul that looked more than a bit like a gingerbread man made out of moldy, ancient paper. He explained carefully that when he had lived on Earth he had been a thief in Antioch, and that although he had only stolen food to feed his starving family, he had been put to death by the Roman overlords and condemned to Hell.
“It’s good news to hear we might be free again someday,” he said in a slow, serious tone. “Good news. And I will do all I can to behave myself and learn the way to do that. Because I want to be free. It wasn’t fair, what happened to me. And when I’m free again, I will go find that shit-eating merchant who called the guards on me, and my bitch of a wife who didn’t even come to see me executed, and all the bastards who did come, and I’ll cut them all into pieces.” He might have been reading a laundry list. He’d been thinking about it a long time.
“Not sure you really grasp the details of the thing, fellow,” said Riprash gently as the gingerbread thief sat down again on the ledge above the stinking flood. “Not about revenge, this. About making ourselves better than we were.”
“I’ll feel better when that stinking merchant is dead,” the gingerbread man muttered, but already somebody else had risen to speak. This damned soul was female, although that wasn’t clear when she first stood up, because she looked more like a person-shape made of overcooked spaghetti, with eyeballs tucked into the tangle in place of meatballs. For a moment she stood, hesitating, winding her tendrils with equally limp fingers.
“Go on, then, love,” said Riprash in an encouraging tone. “It’s Deva, isn’t it?”
She nodded and seemed to find courage. Several more eyes emerged. “When I was alive . . . well, I was a very bad person. I’m sure I deserve to be here.”
“What did you do, dear?” Riprash asked. If you’ve never seen a ten-foot-tall monster making nice, it’s quite an experience.
“I lost my little babies.” A few of her eyes retracted into the forest of noodles or whatever they were. “No, that’s not right. I didn’t so much lose them as . . . I did away with them.”
I might have made a noise of surprise, but nobody else did. “Why was that, dear?” Riprash asked.
“I’m not certain now. I was frightened, and they were so sick, and I had no money to feed them. They were always crying, you see, even though they were terribly weak . . .” She trailed off. She was down to only a few eyes still showing. “I tried everything, really I did. I sold myself to men, but I could never make enough, and the woman who watched them for me when I was out, well, she didn’t . . . she didn’t take very good care . . .” The creature named Deva curled her fingers and tugged at her tendrils so hard I thought she might break them off. “She drank too much toddy, that one, and one day she let my youngest one wander, and my little girl fell from the window down to the courtyard and died. I came home with the smell of a man still on me and found her there on the stones. The bitch taking care of her had not even known she was gone!” The damned woman shook her head, or the lump near the top that I assumed was a head. “I knew then that I would be going to Hell. And the others were still sick, still crying, getting thinner and thinner.” After a long, long silence that nobody interrupted, she said, “So one night, I took them out when everyone else was asleep, took them outside the village and drowned them in the river. It was so sad, because even as I took them down to the bank I was looking for crocodiles. I was going to drown them, but I was still worried that a crocodile might get them!”
She broke down at this point, and it was a while until she could talk again. The strange thing was that the other damned, and even the demon members of the congregation, all waited for her to continue. In a place where nobody even bothered to look twice at a badly injured person writhing on the ground, or a child being beaten or sexually assaulted, these Hell-creatures were waiting patiently, even kindly, for one of their own to find her way back to herself.
“They stoned me to death, of course,” she said finally. “Even the woman who let my littlest one die threw a stone! I have been here a long time. I cannot even guess how many centuries. On and on and on . . . It will sound strange, but even though I am dead, I did not truly know I had been alive until I heard Riprash speak, heard him speaking of how we might someday be lifted. Since I awoke here, I have been like a mole who lives in the ground, go forward, go backward, every day in the dark, and knowing nothing else. My children—I did not think of them. I could not think of them. I could not remember them, because my heart was burned away inside me. But when I heard Riprash talk of the lifting, I could feel myself again. I knew nothing could ever take away my wickedness, that what I had done would be a terrible curse in the mind of God forever . . . but I could hope that someday, perhaps when Heaven and Hell themselves come to an end, I might be forgiven. One day, no matter how dark and dreadful my act, I might see my little ones, my babies, again, so that I can tell them how sorry I am that they were ever born to such a mother—” She bowed her head, and all the tendrils shuddered together. “Ah, God! I am so sorry! So sorry!”
My eyes were dry as I sat in that crowd of damned, doomed folk and listened to her keening apologies to her dead children, but that was only because the demon’s body I wore had no tear ducts.
sixteen
a filthy river runs through it
GOB AND I hid out at Gagsnatch’s until the second beacon had been lit, then our new friend Riprash buried us (carefully) under a load of ship’s provisions on a wagon and drove us down to the docks. My view was entirely of the undersides of coarse sacks full of dried maggots, but I’m not sure it was any worse than seeing the actual city of Cocytus Landing, at least judging by the astonishing variety of unpleasant noises and odors that made their way through the cushioning layers of bagged demon yummies.
Riprash unloaded the provisions himself to make sure we weren’t accidentally beheaded by one of his helpers, then hurried us up the swaying gangplank.
“You’ll stay in my cabin,” he said, gesturing proudly around the low-ceilinged room, which would have been adequate for us if Riprash never came in. As it was, he took up so much of the space that it felt like sharing a bathtub with a humpback whale.
When day had passed and only the afterlights burned, the dockworkers went home. Riprash took us out on deck and showed us around the ship like a retiree displaying his rhododendrons. The Bitch was halfway between a garbage scow and a Chinese junk, long and low, with sails that must have looked like bat wings when they unfurled. It was built with timbers that didn’t seem to match, and was so smeared with tar all over that the ship might have been made from chewed licorice. But from what I could gather from Riprash’s proud descriptions, despite its age and decrepitude, The Nagging Bitch was state of the art when it came to things like shackles, cages, and tools of punishment. I tried to smile and look impressed, but when you’re looking at a thing with metal teeth meant for digging into someone’s crotch to prevent escape . . . well, like I said, I tried to smile.
Riprash had apparently decided he liked me. He showed this newfound solidarity by clapping me on the back from time to time, hard enough to make my bones creak. He also introduced me to the hellish rum he liked to drink, which tasted like bile and gasoline and packed the clout of pure moonshine. No, I didn’t ask how it was made, or from what. Riprash loved to watch me trying to swallow the stuff and rewarded me for the entertainment of seeing me cough, retch, and sputter by telling stories late into the night when I would rather have slept.
But the liquor helped, and it wasn’t that the stories were bad. In fact, by Hell standards my new, large friend’s tales were quite sweet, really, of a simple ogre and his slave ship having interesting adventures around the infernal world. By local standards, Riprash was really an okay guy. Yes, he’d killed a few people—a few hundred, more accurately—during the course of his life, and he had trouble thinking of the damned souls he trafficked in as anything other than mobile meat, but once w
e got to know him I never felt afraid of him, and there’s very few hellfolk I can say that about. Including my girlfriend.
The ship set sail just before the first day-lamp was lit. Riprash let us out on deck once we were underway so we could look around. The Nagging Bitch had so many black sails that the masts looked like some kind of vampire nesting trees. Weighted down with a hold full of caged slaves, she wallowed so low that the river was constantly slapping over the gunwales, and the deck was always at least ankle-deep in Cocytus sludge. but I was delighted to breathe the (comparatively) sweeter air outside the cabin.
That first night, as the city fell away behind us and we sailed into the dark, the great black snake of river soon became invisible. With only the distant beacons on the walls of Hell for light, we might have been traveling through a universe of flickering red stars. I felt suddenly lonely, lonelier than I’d ever been, even with Gob beside me, open-eyed and open-mouthed as he journeyed into what must have been a life he’d never dreamed of living. I was desperate for Caz and that unique moment of completeness she’d given me, I was badly in need of friends like Sam and Monica, and I missed my familiar haunts. You’ve been there, I’m sure, but it feels different in Hell. Chances were very small I’d ever see any of them again. Little Gob was company of a sort, but he wasn’t exactly chatty, and since I was planning to ditch him before things got really dangerous, I didn’t want to get too close, either.
Riprash thumped toward us and spread his massive arms. “This . . . this is freedom,” he said, conveniently ignoring the shrieks of the damned in their cages below. “No master but the winds and the tide. When I felt this, I was first lifted. But I did not even know it then.” He laid a huge paw on my shoulder; if he’d pushed down, I’m pretty sure he could have driven me into the deck like a finishing nail. “Perhaps you come to another fellowship with me, Snakestaff? When we reach Gravejaw, maybe?”
I mumbled something noncommittal. I’m not really a joiner, but out of curiosity I asked, “How many are in your fellowship?”
