by Tad Williams
The chained slaves hobbled slowly away, vanishing within moments into the floating murk of the river bottom, invisible to my stinging eyes.
If I was a different kind of guy, I could probably spend an entire career studying the life (well, you know what I mean) to be found in the rivers of Hell. But I’m not. All I really wanted to do was just find my way out of the river, off this level of Hell, and down to the Neronian Bridge. Still, it was hard not to notice when I saw something thrashing in the mud and, instead of the fishy monster I expected, discovered two animated corpses, little more than bones, trying to murder each other.
Let me reiterate: I had to step over a pair of skeletons, which were struggling in the silt a couple of dozen feet beneath the surface of the Phlegethon. Both of them were missing most of their lower halves, and their bony hands were wrapped around each other’s throats. The throats in question were little more than vertebrae and a few rags of rotting flesh, and they were, I repeat, at the bottom of a river, so it wasn’t like one of them was going to suffocate the other. But there they were. I guess that’s why it’s called Hell.
Anyway, like I said, I could tell you lots more, because there’s lots to tell—carnivorous river worms, lobsterlike beasts that vomited out their own sticky stomachs and reeled them back in like fishing nets, things with the bodies of sharks and the heads of insane horses, all teeth and rolling eyes and, of course, more bodies of the humanoid damned in various states of decomposition, not all of whom seemed to be in the river against their will. In fact, more than a few seemed to have chosen lying in the acid mud at the bottom of the Phlegethon, slowly turning to living mush, over whatever they had experienced on land. Hell’s version of committing suicide, I guess.
I reached the shallows just as my air ran out. I shed the vest and its weight, saving Riprash’s flask, then let myself float to the top. I lay there for long moments, trying to look as much like another suicide as possible until I could take a discreet look around. I spotted the Headless Widow, but saw to my relief that it was still some way out in the river, still waiting near the spot I’d gone down, and there was no sign of Riprash’s ship at all. So far, so good.
I paddled gently forward until I could touch the bottom, then climbed the bank in the darkest and least visible place I could find, in case somebody on Niloch’s boat had a telescope. When I found a comparatively safe spot, I stole a moment’s rest and deep breathing, but was roused by the sound of distant voices.
The Widow appeared to have given up on its vigil over the spot where I’d sunk and was pulling to shore, fires stoked and oars sweeping like centipede legs. I knew that even in this darkest part of the day there would be eyes on board that could see better than mine, so I unwrapped the pistols Riprash had given me from their protective oilskin bag, slid them and the dagger-sword into my belt, and began to make my way up a low bluff, away from the river. But the bluff quickly proved to be only the base of a larger hill, and I was even more exposed on the slope than I would have been on the riverbank, so I had to keep climbing. As I did so, I could look down on Niloch’s ship anchored in the bay, and the landing boats coming ashore. Unlike the Bitch’s little dinghy, these were good-sized craft with several oarsmen in each and room for soldiers and mounts and even Niloch’s hellhounds. It was easy to tell where the hellhounds were, because everyone else was crowded at the other end.
To my dismay, instead of making camp on the shore, the commissar’s troops immediately began to follow in roughly the same direction I’d just come, as though they’d already picked up my scent. I did my best to hurry my pace, although it was dangerous climbing in the dark. As I got nearer the top, I could see my pursuers beginning to flag: the horses, or whatever the hell they were riding, were having trouble with the steep, rocky slope. At last they reached a relatively flat spot several hundred feet below me and began scouting for an easier way up.
I took advantage of this pause to find suitable rock where I could rest and also keep an eye on them. I couldn’t quite make out what they were saying, but I could tell Niloch was furious. I could hear his shrill tones echo out over the river valley. While he scolded his minions, I watched the hellhounds pace nervously on their chains, each one held by two or three keepers, but I soon wished I had chosen something else to watch.
The hounds were huge, about the length of lions or tigers, with low-slung bodies like medieval pictures of wolves, and pelts that appeared almost flat black. I found out later that they looked that way because they didn’t have pelts at all but leathery, scaled hides, something like what you’d find on a Komodo dragon. Then one of them turned toward the place where I was hiding, and its entire pink snout, invisible until that moment, pushed forward out of the rough black sleeve of its face, like a dog’s penis emerging from its foreskin. Even in torchlight the pink protrusion glistened, damp and sticky-looking, featureless but for two huge holes that I guessed were its nostrils. Then the end of the snout opened, revealing a mouth full of inward curving teeth like a Conger eel’s, and I turned and threw up bile, the only thing in my stomach.
I’ve seen a lot of nasty things, but I haven’t seen too many worse than that, because unlike the horrors in the river, these creatures were expressly after me and me alone. When my stomach had finished spasming, I got up and hurriedly made my way across the hillcrest, looking for a place to climb down on the other side. I was still exhausted, but getting an up-close view of the things that were after me was enough to pump a shitload of adrenaline, let me tell you.
To my relief, I could see lights in the valley on the far side of the hill; an array of orange glows that suggested a decent-sized city, twinkling in the mist off the Phlegethon. Closer to me lay a network of roads around the outermost lights, and a winding, torchlit strip along the exterior that looked wide enough to be a highway. I made that my goal and began picking my way down the hill as fast as I could without falling and breaking something important.
It took me what seemed a couple of hours to reach the flats. Once or twice I heard bone-chilling howls from my pursuers in the hills above as they got close. I took more than a few dangerous risks, but I was determined to stay well ahead of them, knowing I had a better chance of losing them in the city than in the wilderness. Also, I needed to find a lifter station, because that was the only way I was going to be able to get down to Abaddon ahead of Niloch and his howling penis-monsters.
The whole time I descended the hill, I saw only four vehicles on the highway: a couple of fancy horse drawn coaches, a simple peddler’s wagon, and a big black car which looked like it belonged to one of the infernal nobility. I didn’t want to get recaptured, but I didn’t want to walk all the way into the city, either, which was miles away, so when I reached the side of the wide road and began following the highway toward the lights, I kept my ears open for possible rides.
I tried to flag down the first one to pass, a coach drawn by a team of horselike creatures (if having human legs can still be considered “horselike”) but the driver lashed at me with his whip and sped on. Perhaps half an hour passed without another vehicle as I trudged on, then I heard the chuffing of a steam engine and saw a grotesque thing that looked half-tank, half-bicycle jolting toward me. I waved and, to my relief, it actually slowed as the driver examined me. Then it hissed to a halt and a door opened on the passenger compartment, which was shaped a bit like Cinderella’s pumpkin coach. I took this as an invitation and clambered up, only to be greeted with the trumpet bell of a blunderbuss in my face.
I was braced to be robbed or shot (or more likely both), but the gun’s owner only surveyed me, then suggested I put my own guns down on the floor of the passenger side. I did as he asked, moving slowly so as not to startle him. Satisfied, the driver engaged his engine again, and we rolled forward.
My rescuer was a wizened, manlike creature with a pockmarked face that sagged on one side and a huge, healing hole in his chest—a hole I could have put my fist through. He saw me staring at his wound and laughed. “Can see why I’
m a bit careful, can’t you? Last one I gave a ride left me with that. Tried to take this old darling here,” he patted the dashboard of his vehicle, “but I blew his head off and left him feeling around for it by the side of the road. Never going to find it, though!” He cackled. “Nothing left!”
I smiled (a bit weakly, perhaps) trying to show how much I approved of decapitating wicked would-be hijackers, because I was of course not that kind of hitchhiker at all. “But you still give rides to people?”
“Gets boring on the run from Poor Meat to Tendon Junction,” he said. “Good to have a little company. Keeps a fellow from losing his mind!” He smiled and nodded vigorously.
I couldn’t help wondering if a man who kept picking up hitchhikers after one of them tried to blow him to pieces hadn’t lost his mind already. In fact, as I learned during the ride, he’d had quite a few near escapes over the years. The hitchhikers had come out of it worse, though.
“And now we are companions,” he said. “My name is Joseph. What is yours?”
I made up a name—I didn’t want to leave any more of a trail than I had to. “What city is that?” I asked as the lights spread before us.
“That’s Blindworm,” he said. “Hope you aren’t planning on going there to make friends.”
“Why’s that?” I asked, even though the last thing I wanted to do in any of the cities of Hell was make friends.
“Not from around here? Strange people in Blindworm. City of the Selfish, I call it.” He didn’t elaborate, but he had lots of other things to talk about. He told me he was in the lock business, like the kind you opened with keys. “Blindworm is my best place for sales. Most of what I make on a trip, I make here. They keep me in business!”
As we approached the outskirts of the city I began to see houses, each one with a neat little yard, like some picture-postcard suburb. But although I could see shapes in some of the windows, nobody was outside. I supposed it was the hour—by my reckoning it was somewhere after midnight in Hell-time—and figured things would be different as we got farther in, but although I spotted a pedestrian or two, they all hurried off the street ahead of us, disappearing into doorways or down alleys as if they feared us.
When I asked Joseph, he shook his head. “You really don’t know? I thought you were joking. How could you not know? The folks in Blindworm hate everyone. They keep to themselves.”
If they kept to themselves, why had they built a huge city of tall buildings? Judging by the size, it seemed there must be quarter of a million inhabitants or more. But as we approached the city’s heart I began to see what Joseph meant. In every dwelling or business we passed, there was never more than one person inside. Even places meant to be used by many people at once, like carriage stops or banks, seemed to be divided into individual stalls, so no matter how many customers there were, they never had to see each other. Half a dozen sat at a bus stop we passed, each cramped in his or her own space like farm animals in a barn. They all looked up at the sound of our motor and watched our passing car with scowling dislike.
Normally I would have examined such a weird thing more closely. I mean, how does a city like that work, full of inhabitants who don’t want to see each other? But Joseph was starting to worry me. The closer we got to the center of the city and the towering lifter shaft that dominated the skyline, the more distracted he became, talking to himself and peering at me from the corner of his eye as though I were the one acting strange. I tried to make harmless conversation with him, but that only seemed to make things worse, and by the time we were within a few blocks of the vast square tower of the lifter station, I had fallen completely silent. That didn’t help, either. Joseph was murmuring continuously under his breath, and kept reaching out to touch the barrel of his shotgun, which was leaning against the padded dashboard between us. When he saw that I’d noticed, that only seemed to make things worse.
“Ah, yes,” he said. “Think you could? But I’d have it first, and then boom! The worse for you!” He chortled, his sagging face as empty as a jack-o-lantern. He was beginning to scare the crap out of me.
“Just let me out here,” I said. “This is where I wanted to go. Thanks for the ride.”
“Thanks?” Now he looked directly at me, and the wide-eyed expression on one half of his face looked even more severe next to the slack features on the other side. Saliva was dripping from the side of his mouth. “You have the audacity to give me thanks? When you want to murder me?” He slowed the vehicle, fumbling for his gun, which lucky for me was clumsily long for the crowded passenger cab. My pistols were still on the floor, and I knew I’d never reach them before he could shoot me, so I yanked open the door, kicked my guns into the road, then threw myself out after them.
A moment later there was an explosion like thunder. Hot gases leaped over my head as a chunk of the building ahead of me flew into powder and chips. As I went scrambling through the dark in search of my pistols, I heard Joseph get out of the car and cock his gun again. “Try to kill me, eh? Come back to try again, eh? Put another hole in Joseph, eh?” he shouted, but before he fired again the nighttime street was ripped by one of the most fearsome noises I’d ever heard: a howl that made my skin want to crawl right off my body and run away without me. The hellhounds. The hellhounds were inside the city. But I’d left them back in the hills, miles away. How had they caught up so fast?
Joseph may have been crazy, but he wasn’t stupid enough to mess with hellhounds. As I recovered my guns, I heard his door slam closed. Then he drove away.
As the noise of his engine dwindled, one of the beasts howled again, an echoing, whooping cry that could stop a healthy heart. Another answered, and it sounded even closer. They were spread out and hunting me, and I was at least half a mile away from the lifter tower in the center of the city. And now I was on foot.
There are times to fight, but this wasn’t one of them. This was a time to run.
thirty-nine
isolation row
SELF-PRESERVATION IS the number one rule in Hell, as you’ve probably already figured out, so you can guess how many people leaped out to help as I sprinted through Blindworm’s business district.
Even as I ran, the bizarre sights of what crazy Joseph had called The City of the Selfish jumped out at me, streets and sidewalks as wide as in a fascist capital (so people could avoid each other more easily, I guessed), public spaces segregated by stalls and blinds so that they didn’t have to see each other and the clerks and shopkeepers never had to see more than one customer at the same time. Even the tracks of the central train station, which I followed toward the lifter column, had walls between them, presumably so the passengers in their individual compartments didn’t have to see riders in other trains. And of course, since it was a big city, even in the middle of the night people were out—cleaners, night-shift workers, coffee shop waitresses and their patrons arranged behind plate glass windows like museum exhibits. And none paid attention to anyone but themselves. Tunnels, walls, boxes, hatches, Blindworm had developed a world-class system of separation. I might as well have been in the middle of the Gobi desert, running across a sand dune, hoping for assistance from the lizards. Not that I was expecting help as I fled down Lonely Street (no shit, that really was the name). The only good thing was, if I didn’t get in their way, the citizens of Blindworm weren’t likely to get in mine, either. City of Sociopaths might be a better name, I thought.
The hellhounds’ bronze claws clattered loudly on the pavement, just half a block behind me now. Even the self-absorbed local citizens were beginning to pay attention, not to me but to the horrible rasp and clang of the pursuit: they disappeared from the street like startled mice as the howls echoed down the lonely corridors between buildings.
I looked back as I turned onto a wide thoroughfare called Isolation Row. The first hound was just turning the corner, mouth jutting from the retracting snout in a complicated snarl of teeth. The beast was almost as high at the shoulder as I was, but I could only run on two feet. It was
like being chased by Eligor’s ghallu all over again—another ancient evil that had wanted to tear me to pieces, that had been bigger and faster than me, too—but this time I had no silver bullets, no Sam or Chico to help me, nothing. I cocked both my pistols, put my head down, and tried to find a little more speed in my exhausted muscles.
I could see the station beneath the massive lifter tunnel at the end of the wide street, and I dug toward it. Several hellhounds were only yards behind me, a rapid-fire clink of claws on asphalt, but I didn’t dare look back again.
The station doors were open. I leaped through, nearly knocking myself out on the first of a series of switchback barriers. Instead of a vast open space, like anyone would have expected in such a large public building, the whole thing had been turned into a rabbit run of mazy walls. I had no time to try to puzzle it out, but luckily the walls were only a little higher than I was tall, and I could still see the broad bottom of the lifter tunnel at the center of the concourse. Apparently, Blindworm had been built with a more conventional hellish population in mind and only modified later.
Just like The Infernal Fauna of the River Phlegethon, the sociological peculiarities of Blindworm could occupy a team of scholars for decades, but all I wanted to do was to survive the next minute or two. I sprinted through the maze, committing about thirteen or fourteen Blindworm Cardinal Sins by not only overtaking other citizens from behind but literally knocking them over so I could get past. The hounds were right behind me, and the Blindwormers who got in my way didn’t curse me long; I heard an entire train of shrieks and mayhem noises behind me as the locals found out what I was running from.
I burst out of the first set of walls into what had been the center of an old concourse, divided now into a beehive of isolation stalls where the passengers could wait. In a continuation of my run of shitty luck, none of the lifters was signaling, which meant that all the doors were still closed. There were no indicator lights to let me know which ones would be available next, either. For all I knew, the next five lifters to arrive might be on the opposite side of the huge central column.
