by Tad Williams
My personal situation was a bit more difficult. Even if I could wash off everything that had leaked, dribbled, and spurted out of the beheaded bodyguard, I was sure I was covered with bleeding wounds of my own. I really didn’t want to go back to the Ostrich looking like that and hope nobody noticed. Hellfolk might not care much about stuff like that as a general rule, but they’d sell you out in a hot second if there was a chance of profit.
I was lucky that I hadn’t left anything I really needed there, because the more I thought about it, the less I wanted to go near the place. I was exhausted, shaking, and looked like I’d fought a cage match with a pride of lions. I needed to go somewhere safe, if only to rest. That really only left me one option.
Before I reached Riprash’s ship, I took a few moments to slip into the oily black shallows of the Styx and wash off as much of Candy’s blood as I could, then I climbed quickly back onto the dock just ahead of a flotilla of large, corpse-white eels who had come wriggling toward the smell of diced bodyguard.
The one thing I couldn’t fix was how I felt on the inside, which was pretty fucking awful. I’d never experienced anything like the killing frenzy that overcame me, not even in the worst moments with the Harps, on the most violent and terrifying of missions. And I had to admit something to myself that I’d been ignoring a long time: Hell wasn’t just getting to me; it had already gotten to me.
The realization made me cold all over. By the time I stumbled into Riprash’s loading operation, I was shivering like someone in the final stages of malaria.
The ogre didn’t bother to ask me what had happened. As soon as he saw my bloody, dripping clothes, he just threw me over his shoulder and carried me up the gangplank to his cabin. He and Gob washed out the worst of my wounds, then bandaged me with comparatively soft cloth and gave me water to drink. I had just enough strength to marvel at how much like actual life it was living in Hell. I could bleed here. I could go mad here.
I could also sleep here. I fell into feverish dark.
When I woke up I was alone. I got to my feet, shaky as a junkie just gone through withdrawal, and climbed to Nagging Bitch’s top deck. It was dark except for the distant red glow of the afterlights. Riprash was just sending home the last of his stevedores.
“Good you’re up,” he rumbled, “’cause the boy and I are going out, and I was about to wake you up to tell you. Didn’t want you fretting when you woke up and found us gone.”
“Gone?” I wasn’t crazy with anger any more, but I still had a healthy dose of Hell-induced paranoia. “Gone where?”
Riprash looked around carefully then leaned toward me. “Fellowship meeting,” he said quietly. “It’s our last night in port, so I’d feel bad if I missed it.”
I’d already attended one of Riprash’s meetings, and as interesting (and even touching) as it had been, I didn’t need to go to another. Still, I would be waiting by myself on the ship, perhaps for hours, knowing all the time that Eligor’s household must be looking hard for whoever had killed the two bodyguards. I hoped if they had a way to slip them into new bodies, it would at least take a while, because I was pretty sure that Candy had recognized me at the end. No, the more I considered it, the less I wanted to stay anywhere alone.
“I’ll go with you.”
Riprash, like most religious folk, was pleased. “Good. Good! I’ll tell Gob. He’ll be right pleased. He’s really taken to the Lifters, you know.”
Gee, the kid felt drawn to a credo that said there might be something more to his life than an eternity of pain, hopelessness, and utter misery? I couldn’t imagine why.
The meeting was in one of the huge warehouses that fronted on one of the main Stygian channels. The floor of the warehouse was stacked full of sacks and earthenware jars, but the upper levels were less crowded, and on the highest floor there was a room that suited the Lifters’ purpose. It was empty but for black straw on the floor, and had a big window that opened onto the roof. Remember, kids, if you’re going to start a heretical sect, always make sure you have at least two available exits.
At least three or four dozen of the damned were waiting there, and the way they perked up at Riprash’s arrival told me he was just as important to this little coven of malcontents as he had been to his Lifters group back in Cocytus Landing.
“Here, let me tell you about a fellow I heard of,” Riprash began when the crowd had quieted a little. “I said, listen up, you scum!”
Shushing by ten-foot-tall monstrosity is actually pretty effective. In the new silence, I could hear the faint sounds of work gangs shouting a short distance down the dock, and the screams of the whipped slaves whose hard labor drove the crane that lifted and lowered the cargo. Even after weeks in Hell, it didn’t make for a soothing background.
“There was this fella,” Riprash began. “I got no idea whether he’s here with us or in the Other Place, but when he was alive, he had a big idea. His name was Origen and he lived in Alexandria—”
“I lived in Alexandria,” said one of the larger, louder audience members. “I never knew anybody went by that.”
Riprash shook his big head. “Enough with your yapping, Poilos. You said that about Alexander the Great, too. ‘How could he be so great if I never heard of him?’ Just keep your mouth shut for a change, and you might learn something.” He scowled, something that would have stopped the heart of most living humans. Poilos didn’t curl up and die, but he did stop talking. “Good,” said Riprash. “Now let me get on with it . . .”
Having heard the talk about Origen and his ideas before, I admit I phased out a little. I was still wrestling with Temuel’s connection to these poor damned bastards. It wasn’t like Riprash was starting an open rebellion or anything—rather the contrary, as far as I could tell. Instead of urging his infernal fellows to rise up and overthrow their post-angelic overlords he asked them to imagine a better day that might come at some unimaginably far date in the future. How could that be useful to Heaven?
A sudden idea occurred to me. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe this had nothing to do with some larger plan, nothing to do with the war between Us and Them, between the Highest and the Adversary. Maybe this was just something that Temuel really believed in. Maybe he actually thought that nobody, not the damned, not even their cursed jailers, was beyond redemption.
That sort of took my breath away. I was suddenly filled with a sense of how big and tragic Hell really was. God, if He was as responsible as my superiors claimed, had built a huge machine to concentrate suffering and institutionalize His punishment. The quid pro quo, as far as I’d ever been able to tell, was, “If you do wrong, even if it is only once for a brief moment, you will be tortured for it forever and ever, amen.” Period. No appeal, no parole. But old Origen of Alexandria hadn’t believed that, and maybe Temuel didn’t either. Could that make any difference in the larger scheme of things?
It could if these damned souls believed it. It would give them something they had never otherwise had—hope. So was my archangel really trying to bring comfort to the most afflicted of all? Or was it, as I had first assumed, just a cynical way to make trouble for the Adversary?
After all the time I’d spent here in the Pit, and despite everyone who had been trying to destroy me, I was having more trouble than ever with the whole idea of Hell. It’s hard to think of the enemy the same way when you’ve seen them at home, met the wife and kids, etc. And I was definitely far into the “etc.” phase, considering that I thought of a female demon as my girlfriend, even if she said she didn’t want to be. Was there still a chance Caz was going to show up tomorrow night? And even if she did, how was I going to get her safely onto Riprash’s ship?
All of those unanswered questions made me restless, so I got up to walk around. That didn’t last long, since the room was full of hideous hell-creatures annoyed with me for creaking the floor while they were trying to listen to Riprash, so I wandered out into the open corridor that crossed the upper level. Most of the storage rooms were empty and their doors
were open. For a moment I thought I saw a disturbingly familiar shape, gray and hunched, in one of the doorways. After a moment’s stunned surprise, I pulled my knife out of my belt and cautiously approached the door. When I stepped through, the room was empty of even the piles of black straw that I expected, and the window at the far end was open, the shutter still propped up.
Could it really have been Smyler? But if it had been, why would he run? Was he afraid of all of the others in the nearby room? Somehow that didn’t seem quite what I expected of him. Maybe he was just waiting for a better opportunity to get me alone.
Rattled, I hurried back to the greater security of Riprash’s Lifter meeting, but I had barely slipped back inside when I was startled by a crash and harsh voices from downstairs. I wasn’t the only one: eyes widened in the near darkness all around the room, then a second later our quiet gathering of damned turned into a cockroach party suddenly exposed to light, malformed shapes scuttling in all directions as the first of the Murderers Sect guards burst through the door with whips and torches and nets.
Had Smyler been spying on us for the authorities? It didn’t really make sense, but it was hard to believe his being here was a coincidence, either.
I struggled through the chaos looking for Riprash, but the ogre appeared as if from nowhere, picked me up by the back of my neck like a stray puppy, and carried me toward the window. He held Gob in his other massive hand, and before I could even make sense of his plan, Riprash had leaned so far out of the window that the boy and I were dangling in midair, nothing beneath us until the hard stone cobbles nearly a hundred feet below. I didn’t have much time to think, however, because a moment later I felt a massive yank and Gob and I were flying through the air with everything spinning around us like the view in a kaleidoscope. It took me a panicked half-second or more before we crashed and rolled and slid to a halt, and I realized that Riprash hadn’t flung us down, but all the way up onto the roof of the warehouse. After that, I was too busy to think about anything much, trying to find my weapons and dodge the shrieking Lifters who had found their way to the roof.
I quickly got separated from Gob in the mad skirmish. It was no longer just the other Lifters on the tiled roof now—the Murderers Sect bullies had arrived, climbing up after us, and they were wading into the nearest of the squealing heretics, dealing out what looked like serious pain, tearing flesh from backs with their bladed whips, crushing limbs and skulls with heavy maces. Those they had beaten down were hauled away in nets, trussed, and left at the corner of the roof while the guards concentrated on those of us who were still free.
As I staggered toward the edge of the roof, waving my boot knife and trying to put as much space between the guards and myself as possible, I heard a scraping, rasping crash and then thunder from just below us. I looked over the edge and saw that Riprash had taken the easiest way out of the room downstairs, smashing his way through the constricting windowframe, taking a lot of the surrounding wall with him as he jumped to the distant ground. He had apparently landed safely and now stood in the middle of a pile of debris and shattered paving, looking up.
“Jump down!” the ogre bellowed when he saw me. “I’ll catch you! Don’t be afraid!” He held out his massive paws. I hesitated, not because I didn’t trust him, but because I still didn’t know where Gob was, and I couldn’t just leave the kid behind. He never would have been in Pandaemonium if it hadn’t been for me.
I saw him at last, struggling like a wet cat in the arms of a guard. Gob’s captor had leathery skin and lips that stuck out in bony, beaklike plates, as if to demonstrate how a real life mutant ninja turtle would be anything but cute. Gamely as he was fighting, Gob clearly didn’t stand a chance; his assailant had already all but immobilized him and was only a moment from getting him into the net with a bunch of others.
I dove on the guard from behind, jabbing my blade deep into where his kidneys should be. I was slowed down by the chain-mail stuff he was wearing, but the demon-cutter was a big knife, and I slammed it into his back with both hands. He made a surprised, croaking noise and let Gob drop. I didn’t bother trying to retrieve the knife, but snatched the kid up and dodged through the chaos of guards and Lifters on my way to the edge of the roof. Down below, Riprash was fighting with three guards, but he was winning, and when I screamed his name he looked up, then made quick work of his enemies, literally knocking the head off one of them with his fist.
I threw Gob down to him. I had a second or two to watch the boy tumble into Riprash’s massive hands, then I was snatched back from the edge of the roof by a couple of Murderer Sectarians. Two or three more joined them, fell on me like thick men on a rugby ball, and that was about it. The last I remembered was someone beating the thoughts out of my skull with some kind of club. It was the worst drum solo ever, and for me, that’s saying something, but fortunately I didn’t have to experience it for long.
thirty-three
the conference room
I WAS AWAKE for some time before I opened my eyes, but my senses kept telling me I was in a meeting room in some Holiday Inn or a Hilton business hotel when I knew I was actually in Hell. Still, I could definitely smell coffee and glazed donuts and the scent of room freshener purchasable in bulk quantities. I was just trying to make sense of it when someone spoke.
“My, my, Advocate Doloriel, you are a persistent little beast, aren’t you?”
My heart didn’t just sink, it crawled into the darkest, deepest corner of my chest and refused to come out ever again. My eyes popped open, too, even though I immediately wished they hadn’t, so I could have pretended a little longer the whole thing was a clubbing-induced dream.
Grand Duke Eligor stood over me in full hellish nobility drag, seven feet tall, in Renaissance-ish robes of flowing black, with a high collar that came up right under his chin. The only odd detail was that, except for the inhuman smolder of his eyes, he was wearing his Kenneth Vald, human billionaire face instead of one of his really scary ones. Not that I wasn’t scared.
I did my best anyway. “Nice outfit, Ellie. Remind me again what the safe word was.”
He didn’t say anything. The room looked exactly like it smelled, with Vald/Eligor standing at the other side of a perfectly ordinary conference table in a perfectly normal hotel conference room (at least it would have been in Visalia or Bakersfield or San Leandro). There was even a box of donuts and a coffee service, with artificial sweeteners and powdered creamer. The only thing missing from this vision of Rotarian perfection was a window with venetian blinds open to a view of the freeway or a business park next door. But this room had no windows.
Eligor folded himself gracefully into a chair just across from me. I didn’t seem to be restrained in any way, but I wasn’t quite ready to test that—not yet, since it was almost certainly what he’d expect me to do. I had no leverage at all except possibly to do something unexpected, and I probably wouldn’t get a second chance, so I was going to wait until I actually thought of something worth trying. In the meantime, I knew Eligor the Horseman well enough from our previous encounters to know he didn’t mind talking.
“So that was all some trap of yours?”
The grand duke smiled a little. “What, that little holy-roller meeting you were attending? Do you really think I would set some elaborate trap for you? The Countess was right—you do have an exaggerated sense of your own importance. No, nobody even knew you were here, little angel, although you were trying very hard to get noticed. Honestly, you came to my own house, Dollar. I thought Heaven didn’t allow suicide.”
“And I thought Hell would knock the pussy out of someone after a few million years, but clearly I was wrong. You saying you didn’t come after me?”
He shook his head as if it almost wasn’t worth answering. “We’ve been looking for ‘Pseudolus’ ever since you made your little visit to Flesh Horse. Did you think we wouldn’t check with the Liars Sect to see if you were legitimate? Then, when somebody took out his bad temper on Candy and Cinnamon—well
, as you can guess, we were getting very interested. When the Pandaemonium City Guards picked you up with those Lifter idiots, one of my informants recognized you as the one we were looking for . . . so here you are.” He shook his head. “You’ve all but ruined the Countess’s bodyguards. Was that really necessary? First you kill my assistant back in San Judas, now you come all the way to my place here and do in a couple of harmless wage-slaves. You have something against working folk?”
“Enough of your bullshit,” I said. “Let’s cut to the hugs and learning so we can finish this. You want the feather. That’s why you sent Smyler after me. Our business with the Countess aside, I had to do something, since it was obvious after that you weren’t going to leave me alone. And you knew I’d made it into Hell because Smyler followed me here, so don’t pretend you’re surprised to see me.”
He looked at me for a long moment, his face as blank as a weathered statue of some ancient king. “Yes, Smyler,” he said. “Of course.”
“You don’t need to play games, big man. You hold all the cards. Do what you’re going to do. I’m not giving you the feather, and I’m not going to tell you where it is. You’ll just kill me anyway, so why should I make it easy on you?”
He smiled, his lips curling slowly back, an unhurried predator with a staked-down meal. For the first time, I could see that he was probably as old as the planet, if not older. “Very good. The hero speech. But I think you’re supposed to say that after I’ve tried to soften you up a little. Has more resonance that way.”
