by Tad Williams
Over what must have been the next couple of days, we raced along the pitchy Styx, past countless disgusting harbors. Riprash wasn’t worried about hiding me from the crew now, since nobody was going ashore, and soon I was spending hours at the ship’s rail watching the coastal towns of Hell slide by.
“Y’see, I been thinking about all this,” Riprash explained to me one night. “It comes to me that maybe it’s time I should be doing something else.”
I was a bit surprised. “Something else? Like what?”
“Bringing the Lifters’ Word to more than just the few,” Riprash said, looking as philosophical as a monstrous giant with a split skull is able to look. “Ever since you brought me that word from you-know-where. I only half-believed Donkeysmile told me a real story until now, y’see, so I never really got up off my haunches to do what I know is right.”
I shook my head in confusion. Riprash explained that a long time before, when he first worked for Gagsnatch, a demon named Donkeysmile had been thrown from another ship, and Riprash rescued him. He found the newcomer to be surprisingly intelligent, good company on the long voyage. Eventually, the newcomer had confessed that he came from somewhere else—in other words, outside of Hell—and passed along the gospel of the Lifters to Riprash. Riprash had been alive so long that he had become, as he put it, “a mite philosophical in my age,” and what the stranger said touched a chord inside him.
I was darkly amused by “Donkeysmile.” If that was what Temuel had chosen to call himself in Hell, then “the Mule,” our nickname for him at the Compasses, had been pretty much right on the money after all. But what had Archangel Temuel been doing in Hell in the first place? Another question that led me nowhere useful.
“But these days, since you came and gave me his words,” Riprash continued, “I’m thinking that there’s more for me to do than just to live on like nothing’s changed. I’m wondering if you coming with Donkeysmile’s message, if that’s like a sign, d’you see? A sign for me that it’s time to do different. To take the Lifters’ message all round, to those who’ve never heard it.”
If Riprash really planned on becoming a missionary in this, the least missionary-friendly place I could imagine, I was glad he and I were going to be parting company pretty soon, probably as soon as we reached Cocytus Landing. I felt bad that I had dropped little Gob in all this, but I told myself the life he’d had in the filth of Abaddon wouldn’t be anything he’d miss much.
I also kept running into Riprash’s strange little employee, the one I had privately named Krazy Kat. He was some kind of bookkeeper, which brought him frequently into Riprash’s presence, and yet every time he saw me he goggled like he had the first time, although he always stopped when he saw that I’d noticed. It was beginning to annoy me and, to be honest, to worry me a little. I asked Riprash where the little catlike fellow had come from.
“Wart? I don’t think he’d been with me for a season before you showed up. He just walked up to Gagsnatch one day, said he’d heard we needed a body could do sums. As it happened, we did, and he’s been with us since. Quiet, and he does seem a bit fixed on you, but other than that I’ve had no trouble from him. I’ll make him come and tell what’s what.”
“I’m not sure—” I began, but Riprash had already sent Gob to fetch him.
“Now,” said Riprash when Gob had returned with the little accountant-creature, “why do you want to be plaguing Snakestaff here with your nonsense, Wart?”
The little fellow looked up in abject terror. He gave a single squeak but otherwise couldn’t summon any useful noises. Out of pity, I convinced Riprash to let me take over the interrogation.
“You’re not in trouble,” I said as reassuringly as I could. “It’s just that I want to know why you’re always looking at me the way you do.”
Now he wouldn’t look at me at all. “Don’t know.”
“Well, think about it. Nobody’s going to hurt you.”
“Lest he tells a lie,” growled Riprash, “’Cause then I’ll have his head right off and eat it,” which probably wasn’t as helpful as the ogre had intended it to be. A good length of time passed before Wart could be roused from his faint, and then it still took a while before his teeth stopped chattering so he could speak.
“Don’t know,” he told me in a tinny little murmur. “Just . . . something about you. Your face. Not those things,” he said, pointing at the bumps I’d added after Vera’s house to disguise myself. “Saw it first time. Feels like . . . I know you. Seen you, anyway.”
But no matter what else I asked him, he couldn’t clear up the mystery. Like a lot of the residents of Hell, little Wart didn’t really remember much about the previous week, let alone the details of his earlier life in Hell. I examined the little demon carefully. He was unexceptional in appearance, at least by hellish standards, somewhere between an alley cat dipped in motor oil and a very ugly lawn gnome, but now that I was really looking hard, there was something about him I couldn’t quite put my finger on, but which nevertheless plucked at my memory. Had I seen him in one of my earliest moments in Hell? If so, his features were so ordinary by local standards I couldn’t believe I’d spent more than a moment looking at him. And if my memory was that good, I should have been out of Hell and cleaning up on Jeopardy.
“Right, Wart, you can go,” Riprash told him at last. “If you think of anything, come tell me, but not in front of anyone but these two,” he said, indicating Gob and me. “Too many ears.”
Wart nodded slowly. “Too many ears,” he said, but the phrase seemed to have caught his attention and he repeated it as if hearing it for the first time. “Too many ears . . .”
The little creature turned to gape at me. I think it came to him just as it came to me.
“Walter . . . ?” I said. “Walter Sanders? Is that you? What are you doing here?”
And it was him, I could see it now through all that weird—Walter Sanders, my angel buddy from back at the Compasses, stabbed by Smyler and missing ever since. Was I hallucinating? Had I been in Hell so long my mind was crumbling? But the little bookkeeper wore an expression that must have been a mirror of mine—the slow dawning, the unlikely facts caught in the bottleneck of logic and unable to slide past.
“Yes,” he said, his words barely audible. “Yes! Walter Sanders. No. Vatriel. That’s my real name.” He looked around the cabin, then looked over Riprash, Gob, and me, blinking as he did so like a slow loris caught in a flashlight beam. “What am I doing here?”
“You don’t know?” Fat lot of good any of this was going to do me. Just more mysteries on top of the ones I already had and didn’t want. “You don’t remember?”
He was shaking his shaggy head when a crewman rapped on the cabin door, urging Riprash to come to the quarterdeck.
Walter and I were no closer to solving what had happened to him between his being stabbed by Smyler and taking a job with Gagsnatch’s Quality Slaves when Riprash shoved open the cabin door. “Trouble,” the ogre said. “Come up.” I’d scarcely ever seen him look worried, but now he really did, the great shelf of his brow frowning until his eyes were almost invisible.
Gob and I and Wart aka Vatriel aka Walter followed him up onto the deck. The shape on the horizon was so small and its lights so faint that it took me a long moment to realize it was a ship.
“What’s the ensign?” Riprash asked Gob. “Use those young eyes.”
Gob climbed up so he could lean out over the rail, then spent a half minute squinting into the foggy darkness. “Bird’s foot,” he said as he scrambled back down to the ogre’s side.
“Feared that,” said Riprash. “That’s the sign of the Commissar of Wings and Claws. It’s Niloch’s ship, The Headless Widow.”
I was frightened but didn’t want to show it. “Charming name.”
“Whole thing is Raping the Headless Widow, but that’s too long for most folks, ’cause they don’t want to talk about that ship much anyway. She runs on steam, she’s got something like twenty guns to ou
r eight—and only two of ours work—and she’ll catch us by tomorrow or the next day, certain.”
I could see Niloch’s ship a little better now, a dark shadow hunkered low in the Stygian waters, its lanterns peering at us like eyes in the fog. I had hoped I’d burned the ugly, rattling bastard to ashes when I blew up his Gravejaw House, but hellish nobility are extremely hard to kill. And as I think I’ve mentioned, they’re also very serious about holding grudges. Apparently, the commissar had managed to get himself appointed to head up the Bobby Hunt. “Can we fight them?”
“If by fight you mean get cut to pieces, burned, and sunk, then yes, we’ll put up a fine fight. Ah, well. I always suspected I’d wind up at the bottom of the Styx someday.”
As if to underscore this cheery thought, the wind changed direction and our sails sagged. As I stared out across the dark expanse of river I could hear the hungry rumble of the Headless Widow’s engines.
thirty-seven
walking on water
HERE’S A little rule about warfare at sea: Avoid it.
Here’s a corollary pertaining to warfare against a ship full of angry demons, on a mythical river inhabited by monsters, and with no better hope, even if you win, than fighting your way across the rest of Hell afterward on the off chance that you might find your way out again, at which point your angry angelic bosses or any number of other interested parties will get on with the job of ripping your soul out of your body and sending it right back to Hell again: Avoid that even more strenuously.
But there I was, standing at the Bitch’s rail, watching just such a demonic ship bearing down on us, as it had been doing for hours.
In ordinary circumstances we’d have been all right, because we had the current with us and our ship was small and fast. Slavers had to be, not because slavery was illegal in Hell (not bloody likely) but because slaves were valuable cargo that other ships were only too happy to steal. But according to Riprash, Niloch’s ship was powered by four huge steam engines, so even if we could get through Styx Lock ahead of them, they would gain on us even faster when we reached the thicker, more resistant waters of the Phlegethon.
If we ran all night, Riprash said, risking going onto a rock and only-the-Highest-knew what else, and we managed to stay ahead of Niloch, we’d probably reach the lock in the earliest hours of the morning. But after that, it would be only a matter of time before he overtook us. Riprash and his crew were busy keeping us alive until then, coaxing every bit of speed out of the old slaver’s tub, but I had nothing to do but walk back and forth on the deck nursing a growing sense of disaster.
In less fucked-up circumstances it would have been interesting to watch the crew working together to keep the Bitch running ahead of our enemies. Many of them had the apelike look of Gob, which stood them in good stead as they swung through the shrouds even more nimbly than the most experienced human sailors. Others less suited for climbing looked as though they’d be most useful when it came time to fight, especially a pair of brothers named Retch and Rawny, who had razor-sharp talons on hands and feet and were covered all over with spiny plates. Still, if the enemy caught us, even those two were going to find it hard to do much more than outlive us by a few moments. The Headless Widow was closer now, and even in the dim red light reflected from Hell’s awesome ceiling, the only glow on this stretch of the oily river, it was plain that their ship was far larger than ours and their crew far more numerous.
It was my fault that Niloch was bearing down on the Bitch, my fault that when he caught up, he’d sink Riprash’s ship and take the survivors into slavery. It was up to me to help save them, or all this hopefulness about redemption was just noise.
Then, as I paced, I suddenly remembered what Riprash had said about throwing the owner of the pistols I was wearing overboard, and that gave me an idea—a crazy, hopeless one, but I wasn’t in a position to be picky—so I went to ask Walter about supplies we might have on board. I found my former co-worker standing at the starboard rail watching the Widow’s lights slowly grow closer.
“Riprash says Niloch’s the worst kind of demon,” said Walter quietly.
“There’s a kind that’s worse than the others?”
“He said Niloch’s the sort who wants to make a name for himself, but he’s basically mediocre. Mediocre—that’s my word, not Riprash’s. He said, ‘useless.’ He says it’s the ambitious, stupid ones who make the most trouble.”
“Not just here, either,” I said, thinking of Kephas. “Still can’t remember anything about what happened?”
Walker shrugged. He didn’t meet my eye. “Sorry. I do know you, though, Bobby. It took me awhile, but I remember you now. I think you treated me square.”
“We were friends,” I told him. “That’s how I always saw it. Do you remember anything else? The Compasses?”
He rubbed his wrinkled little face. “Not really. I mean, I know it was a place and that I used to go there. I sort of remember it was a place where people laughed and . . . sang?”
“Not so much singing as putting money in the jukebox and shouting along,” I said. “But, yeah. More or less.”
“I think . . . I think I remember Heaven, too.” He spoke slowly, as if wanting to be certain of what he said. “At least, that’s what it seems like. Beautiful, bright light. Someone talking to me. A sweet, sweet voice.”
“Yeah, that sounds like Heaven. But you can’t remember anything else?”
“No.” He was frustrated, almost tearful. “No, but it’s important. I know it’s important.”
I felt like his pain was my fault, too, but it had to be better for him to know he didn’t belong in Hell, didn’t it? It wouldn’t have been kind to leave him in ignorance. That’s what I tell myself, anyway. “Well, if you think of anything, let me know. Because something is definitely weird. You were attacked by the guy they sent after me, then . . . you just never came back. I expected they’d put you in a new body . . .” I broke off, having noticed something happening on the horizon, where The Headless Widow had grown taller as it approached, so that it now looked almost like Gravejaw House itself had taken to the river. “Is Niloch’s ship . . . on fire?” I stared, positive that I was seeing things. Certainly it was too convenient otherwise, for our enemy simply to catch fire. “Riprash!” I shouted. “Come here!”
When the ogre arrived, the cloud of smoke and fire around the Widow had spread out a good way on either side, and I truly began to believe that fate might have saved me from an extremely unpleasant end to my infernal vacation. “It’s fire, right? It’s burning?”
Riprash didn’t look like someone ready to celebrate. “It’s fire, right enough. But it’s not their boat burning. Fact, whatever it is, it’s coming toward us.”
“What? Is it a gun? Did they fire something at us?”
I never got an answer, at least not from Riprash, because the dark cloud full of fire was growing so fast that I couldn’t see Niloch’s ship any more. A moment later something shot over our heads, flaming like a tracer bullet. It hit the deck, bounced once in a shower of sparks, then smacked into the far gunwale. A nearby sailor threw a bucket of black Styx water on it.
“What is it?” asked Walter, but a moment later a dozen more whipped past us and we could see that they were birds, gray and plump and fast, and every single one of them on fire.
A couple struck the mizzen sail and started the fabric smoldering. A pair of simian deckhands scrambled up the lines to put it out, but even as they climbed several more birds struck the mizzen and the topsail. Another winged blaze came hurtling over the water toward us, bobbing crazily, and smacked right into Gob, catching in his hair and setting it alight. Riprash roared and grabbed the boy, then leaned out over the rail, stretching his huge arm to dunk the boy in the river and extinguish the flames.
“Niloch’s doing! He’s the Commissar of Wings and Claws,” Riprash shouted as he dropped soaking Gob to the deck. More birds flew past as if shot out of a gun, trailing flames, trying to fly even as their wings bur
ned away. “Man the buckets, every helljack of you!” he bellowed. “They’re trying to set the sails alight, and if the sails burn, they’ll catch us before the next glass. Pass those buckets! Keep the water coming!”
I joined the madness, taking my place in a line, passing sloshing pails of stinking Styx water from the bilge up to the masts. The best climbers were kept busy putting out the fires wherever the hell-pigeons struck, but even so, the mizzen sail was gone and the topsail almost entirely aflame, and only heroic work by the crew kept it from spreading to the other sails.
The flock finally thinned, but without the topsail we were losing ground even more swiftly. I squatted down on the deck beside Walter and struggled to catch my breath before the next wave of flaming birds.
Something pale flew past me, rattling. Another pale shape struck the mainmast behind us and fell to the deck, thrashing and snapping. It was a flying fish, or at least part of one—an almost fleshless skeleton. But the fact that it was mostly bones and empty eye sockets didn’t keep it from trying to sink its teeth into everything it could reach before it died. Several more flew past, then suddenly a whole flock or school or whatever you call it seemed to tumble down on us. Several of the crew putting out fires were knocked out of the rigging as if they’d been hit by bullets. They fell to the deck—I could hear bones breaking—so I grabbed Walter and dragged him back toward Riprash’s cabin. Gob was already there, hunkered down in the doorway, watching with wide eyes as the swarm of mummified fish smacked into the sails and deck.
Then, from out of the distance, I heard The Headless Widow’s cannons fire, a deep roar like sequenced thunder. They were still too far away to reach us, but it was an announcement of sorts: the end was coming, whether sooner or later.
“I have an idea,” I shouted to Gob and Walter over the yelling and screaming of the crew, many of whom were barely clinging to the ropes overhead as they dodged the toothy horrors. I asked Gob, “Can you sew?”
