by Tad Williams
I kept pouring Riprash’s booze over the wound as I worked. I’m happy to say that the intracubus hated the stuff, but that only made it struggle harder. I came close to passing out several times before I finally got my fingers around the horrible, horrible little thing and yanked it out—it felt like I was taking half the insides of my head with it. After that I did go black, but only for a short while.
When I came back to reality, the intracubus was struggling to escape across the muddy bottom of the ravine on its dozen little barbed legs, still trailing several of my nerve fibers. I guess I didn’t need any of them too badly, or at least not enough to notice in the midst of so much fucking pain. I poured a last dollop of ogre booze into my breached skull and shook my head from side to side to swirl it around in the baseball-sized wound, then I got up on very shaky legs, found a large rock, and carefully ground Eligor’s minion into a scummy smear. Its shrill screams, brief as they were, made little bubbles in the slime.
Oh, but it felt so good to have nothing in my head but my own dubious ideas, I can’t tell you. I even licked the knife clean. Hey, it was my own blood, and I couldn’t afford to waste any more of it.
Niloch and his lynch mob hadn’t waited while I performed self-surgery, of course. Some of the hounds sounded like they’d already found their way down to the bottom of the ravine, which meant they were only a few dozen yards behind me. At least now, when the commissar and his penis-pups caught me, I would have the small pleasure of being able to scream out every secret of Eligor’s I knew.
Yes, I was finally beginning to feel at home in Hell.
I clapped a hand over the hole in the back of my skull to keep inside what brains I still had left, then I began to run again.
forty-two
this lousy t-shirt
SO THERE I was, hobbling along, oozing brains and blood, at my lowest ebb, my pursuers closing on me, when a miracle happened.
Well, I thought it was a miracle. You unbelievers would probably call it a drainpipe—a big hole gushing water into Suicide Swamp and leading upward.
I probably mentioned before that the rivers of Hell run in and out of the different layers. I couldn’t make a model for you if I tried because the physics are impossible, but Hell has holes. Conduits between the levels allow the rivers and their streams to flow through and down to the next level, and I had stumbled onto one of these conduits—a big stone tunnel. Although the water coursing out of it was as foul and disgusting as you’d guess, I thought it was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen or even smelled, because at the other end, one level up, was the Abaddon level that contained my current number one favorite span, the Neronian Bridge. It felt like the Highest was saying, “See? You doubt Me, and yet I reach down and give you an escape route. Still feel like busting My balls?”
No time to celebrate, of course. Niloch and his hunters were sloshing through the undergrowth at the bottom of the ravine not far behind me.
I was lucky it wasn’t an actual pipe, but a tunnel scraped by erosion through the raw stone of Hell itself, because there was no way I would have been able to climb through a real, slippery drain pipe with that much water rushing at me. But the rough stone and debris gave me handholds and footholds. All I needed was a little bit of luck and soon my buddies at the Compasses would be wearing souvenirs that read, “My Co-Worker Went To Hell, And All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt!”
Of course, nothing really happens “soon” in Hell except the pain reflex, and climbing up that wet tunnel wasn’t the piece of cake I thought it would be. There were a few times when only my toe-tips and the fingernails of my one good hand kept me from tumbling back down into the bog of the Grey Woods. But at last I reached the top of the sluice and tumbled out into Abaddon. I stood there for a few seconds, drenched in the stinking, sticky waters of Cocytus, and coughed out some of the sludge I’d swallowed. Coughing really made the hole in my head hurt, of course. I was knee deep in one of several filthy rivulets that came together there, but more importantly, I was back on the same level where I’d found young Gob and begun my journey, so long ago that it seemed like it had happened to a different Bobby Dollar entirely. And, in a way, it had.
I was in a neighborhood that I had passed through before, cramped streets between slumping mud-brick dwellings, a place full of misshapen, shuffling figures, where every breath was full of red dust, and the sounds of violence and suffering never stopped. But Abaddon was the first layer above the Punishment Levels, which made it a place of freedom—at least in comparison with what lay below, starting with the Suicide Forest and getting worse and then even worse and then unimaginably worse the lower down you went. The creatures here in Abaddon were suffering because they were in Hell, but they weren’t being actively tortured. These were the creatures the nobility of Hell shanghaied to use as slaves, the workers who performed Hell’s most disgusting labors, and served as cannon fodder (sometimes literally!) in Hell’s armies. They would have been the lowest of the low in all the universe, except for one thing—they still clung to a tiny bit of freedom, still made lives for themselves in the midst of horror. Some of them, like Riprash, even thought there might be something more for them someday, and dreamed impossible dreams of an end to torment—dreamed, perhaps, of an eventual taste of kindness. The things living here weren’t just damned monsters, they were also human souls.
Just when I was in danger of turning maudlin, I heard a horn echoing from the stony walls, along with the distant but still unpleasantly clear baying of hellhounds. The commissar and his men must have retreated when they saw what I’d done and hurried back to the station to climb up to Abaddon in a lifter. Which meant my feelings of relief were bullshit: they were close enough to catch me long before I reached the bridge. Time to run again.
My head felt like a smashed melon, and I could have sworn I was on my last legs. In any other circumstance I would have been, but I didn’t have the luxury of collapsing. I tried to recall every single thing Gob had shown me, every trick for getting quickly across Abaddon. I went right through the houses of the damned, I leaped from rooftop to rooftop like a comic book character—well, like an extremely tired, mostly one-handed comic book character—and took every shortcut I could remember, including one where I skittered down a crumbling wall with an immense, fire-belching pit beneath me instead of just the distant ground. Through luck and taking a few crazy chances, I managed to put enough distance between myself and my pursuers that the cries of the hellhounds grew faint, but I knew it wouldn’t last.
I finally reached a spot where the streets ended and the dark, empty outer passages began. I had no lantern, but I had been a long time in these lower reaches, and my demon eyes served me well.
I did my best to make the narrow passages behind me difficult for my pursuers, pulling down stone and other debris wherever I could. I’ll also confess to running down a few side-tunnels when the pursuit had fallen far enough behind me that I couldn’t hear them, then scenting the false trail by sprinkling it with my own piss before dashing back to my chosen path.
One of the problems with being in Hell, I realized as I darted through holes and across open places like a frightened rat, was that you could never really relax, never stop to think about what was going on. I’d learned that lesson the hard way from Vera’s house, where I did relax, precisely when I should have been thinking.
I might have chosen to come here, but it certainly hadn’t been because I thought it would be fun. Leaving Caz out of the equation for a moment, I tried to make sense of what had happened and what I’d learned, on the very off chance that I’d survive to do something about it.
The undead horror Smyler had told me he received his marching orders from Kephas him-or herself. Could that be possible? I’d assumed it was Eligor who so badly wanted me silenced, but now that I thought about it, Kephas had at least as much to lose as the grand duke if the feather that signified a secret deal between important angel and important demon fell into the wrong hands. But would a hea
venly VIP like Kephas try to destroy another servant of Heaven, even an unpopular one like yours truly? Then again, I’d wondered for years if a high-ranking somebody had silenced my old mentor Leo, my top-kicker in CU Lyrae. How much harder was it to imagine that one of my bosses sent a dead murderer to shut me up?
But Kephas was only a disguise for what I guessed was a fairly powerful angel: I still didn’t know who my real enemy might be. What good would it do to escape Hell and save Caz if I promptly got bumped off by my own side? Or even worse, got Sam’s whole Third Way thing pinned on me? My record didn’t look good: my best friend Sammariel had been working for the Third Way mutiny all along, but when I had a chance to nab Sam, I let him go. Then I’d gone on an illegal jaunt to the actual factual Inferno to rescue my demon girlfriend and had even made a deal with Eligor the Horseman, right in his own demonic palace. I mean, really—how much spin would Kephas need to make me look literally guilty as hell? Not much.
But if this wasn’t all some elaborate trick by Eligor (still a possibility) and it really had been Kephas who sent Smyler after me, not just on Earth but all the way to the place of eternal punishment, what could I possibly do about it? Until I knew who the enemy on my own team was, I was an easy target.
As I wearily stumbled through the bleak labyrinth on the edge of Abaddon, breaking occasionally into a desperate sprint when I found the strength, another realization crept over me. A very scary one—yes, even for a man fleeing hellhounds. The mysterious Kephas might very well be one of the five ephors investigating the whole Third Way affair, and also keeping a watchful, disapproving eye on Yours Truly. I wasn’t positive that Kephas was one of them, of course—there were literally thousands of angels in the hierarchy above me. But if I were a big-time archangel doing something huge and underhanded, I’d want to be on the committee investigating it, not only to interfere with the inquiry in subtle ways but also so that I’d realize if they were getting close to finding me out.
Karael was the toughest and scariest of the Ephorate, at least to me; he probably still had uniforms spattered with the blood of fallen angels from the Big One. But he also didn’t seem like the type to go setting up an angelic daycare center full of socialist ideals like the Third Way. The other four I didn’t really know very well, except for Anaita, with whom I’d had a brief, slightly strange conversation in the Hall of Judgement before Karael showed up. Made me wish we’d had a chance to talk longer. And although I still didn’t know why Terentia had been made leader of the Ephorate over the much better known Karael, I didn’t have any other information about her, bad or good, to move her up the list of suspects. Chamuel and Reziel I knew even less, although Reziel was interesting because he/she/it (or “se,” as angel speech put it) appeared to be sexless, just as Kephas had been, at least according to Sam.
Of course that didn’t really mean much, because any one of them was capable of creating an impenetrable disguise, so I’m sure if Reziel was the traitor, se could have made hermself appear as feminine as Tinker Bell or as masculine as . . . well, as Karael.
And now I had another mystery to wonder about: What was angel Walter Sanders doing in Hell? I couldn’t believe it was a coincidence that he’d been stabbed by the same guy trying to get me, and then just happened to wind up down here in Hell. Smyler claimed he was taking his orders from Kephas. Did that include an order to take Walter off the game board first? Walter had been wanting to talk to me back at the Compasses that night—was it something to do with all this? Then, of course, his “death” and banishment to the nether regions had wiped all that away . . .
It came to me so suddenly and so powerfully that I barely noticed the mists rising around my feet, which meant I was close to the bridge. I should have been capering with joy, but a new thought had blossomed like a nose-pimple on the morning of senior prom, and it would not be ignored, even at this triumphant moment.
Walter, in his Krazy Kat form, had come up with something just as I parted from him and Riprash and the rest. “I remember something about the voice that asked me about you!” he’d called as I climbed into the landing boat. I’d had no idea what voice he was talking about, but what if he’d remembered something from when he was still an angel? What if that was what got him sent to Hell in the first place?
I was so caught up in these questions I almost brained myself on a low-hanging ceiling, which wouldn’t have done my throbbing head any good. I was tired, stumbling, but I couldn’t shut off the thoughts.
What had Walter told me? Why hadn’t I listened more carefully? Yes, I had been worrying about a lot of other things just then, like fang jellies and hogsquids, but I was furious with myself now. The answer to everything, maybe—or at least the answer to who’d sent Smyler after me—and I’d let a few minor things like hellhounds and self-surgery flush it out of my memory.
I came out of the last stony passage a mere hundred yards or so from the gate and that ugly, glorious bridge. As I hurried toward it I struggled to remember everything from that moment I’d left the Bitch—the rotting smell of the Bay of Tophet, Riprash’s huge hands passing me the cannonball that was going to weight my descent to the bottom, Gob’s interested, skeptical face, and Walter in his damned form, looking like something that could only be found living in trees on Madagascar.
What had he said?
And then it came to me. “It was a child’s voice,” he’d shouted as I lowered myself into the dinghy, desperate to let me know, to help me, even though I was leaving him stranded in Hell. “A sweet, child’s voice!”
A hunting horn blared behind me, as startlingly close as a crow screeching on my shoulder. I turned to see the first of the hellhounds plunge forward out of the mist with its two dark, eyeless brothers right behind it, and beyond them the complicated shadow of a company of armed demons.
I sprinted toward the bridge, cursing the usual Bobby Dollar shitty luck. I was really irritated that I was going to be caught just when I finally had the answer to the riddle of Walter’s banishment.
Anaita had a voice like that. Anaita, alone among those of Heaven’s most powerful angels I knew, often spoke in a voice like a little girl. Wouldn’t she disguise it? Not necessarily, not if she didn’t realize the sound of her voice would be significant later. Perhaps she had merely asked Walter some questions about me in her normal role as an important heavenly officer, questions that he’d found odd. Perhaps that was what he meant to tell me when Smyler stabbed him. If so, Walter’s earthly body had been murdered and his soul sent to Hell just to keep him from telling me that Anaita had been asking about me.
Wow. I knew the higher angels were different than me, but Anaita aka “Kephas”—ephor, Heavenly Principality, and Holy Guardian of Fertility—was evidently fucking ruthless.
It didn’t matter, though, because I was never going to be able to do anything about it. Niloch and his Ugly Boys’ Club were right behind me, and I hadn’t even reached the bridge. It looked like my friends weren’t going to get those souvenir Tshirts after all.
forty-three
mr. johnson and me
APPROPRIATELY, ROBERT Johnson’s infamous blues song kept running through the back of my mind as I raced the last yards toward the bridge.
“. . . Got to keep movin’
Blues fallin’ down like hail
Blues fallin down like hail . . .
And the days keep on worryin’ me
There’s a hellhound on my trail
Hellhound on my trail . . .”
One of his very best songs. I don’t know anyone who loves the blues who isn’t fascinated by Johnson; his strange, short life and his haunted voice. And at the moment it was literal truth for me—hellhounds baying just behind me, Hell-soldiers and ratbat-crazy Commissar Niloch behind them—and that made it an odd time to have any song going through one’s mind instead of one of the standard variations on Oh my God I’m going to die run run run fucking run!
Still, even an angel can have feelings of inferiority, and as I sprinted
for my life and soul across the ashy, stony ground of the last inner cavern toward the gate and the Neronian Bridge, a part of me was actually pleased that I could finally consider Johnson without feeling like such a white-guy poseur. At last I could say, without reservation, “Yeah, I know just what you’re talking about, Robert—I’ve had those blues. I know just what you mean.”
Stupid, I know, especially at a time like that, but if I hadn’t been stupid I wouldn’t have been in that situation in the first place, would I?
I plunged through the gate tower, forgetting how close it was to the end of the Bridge. A couple of steps later, when I crashed into the first ashy, Pompeii-victim Purgatory creatures trying to force their way into Hell, I almost slid right off the bridge into that unimaginable abyss. Getting past them was like forcing my way through rotting Styrofoam. The silent shapes created just enough resistance to make things difficult and blocked my vision as well, not to mention that any damage I did to them left their soapy scum on the Bridge itself. Now try to imagine fighting your way through literally dozens and dozens of the things on a bridge less than six feet wide, with nothing beneath you for miles except screams floating up from the deeps.
I still had Riprash’s giant knife in my belt, so I yanked it out and began to hack my way through the things. I know I’m an angel, and I’m supposed to be sympathetic by nature, but after having just spent a really long time in Hell, the thought that the only thing these horrible, mindless shapes wanted was to get into the place made me far less patient with them than the first time through. I shredded them like a cluster bomb in the middle of Smurf Village, sending bits flying everywhere like dirty suds. The hellhounds were roaring behind me as they encountered the first of the Purgatory refugees, and I fancied I heard a note of doggie surprise at how difficult it was to get through them.
