by Tad Williams
“Now you’re just making fun of me.”
“Don’t be so sure, Junior. Everyone knows I have no shame.”
All the way out to Sand Point I kept trying to call Caz, but she still wasn’t picking up. It was crazy, I knew. I should have been pretending it never happened, praying no one would ever find out, but instead I was desperate to talk to her. What had she done to me? Or, to be more accurate, what had I done to myself? I couldn’t stop thinking about her. I’ve been with more than a few women, angelic and mortal, but I never had a problem moving on. Rather the reverse, as Monica kept pointing out to me: I’m not exactly Mr. Relationship. Too many lone-wolf detective movies, too many crime novels where the woman turns out to be faithless, or maybe I’m just a selfish bastard. Any way you sliced it, though, whenever I stopped actively forcing myself to think of something else, my memory filled up with images of the Countess’s pale body, her fiercely solemn face, the unforgettable feeling of her cold, smooth skin.
It couldn’t be love, though. Who but a teenage metal-head could actually fall in love with a demon? Certainly not a guy whose life work was to thwart and even destroy such creatures whenever possible, right? But every time I listened to her message machine come on, her crisp accent as she repeated the number, followed by the message beep that meant nobody was picking up, I died a little bit inside.
The front walkway of the Ralston was crowded with new arrivals, their luggage, and hurrying bell staff. The parking lot was just as busy. I spent fifteen minutes driving around until I found an empty space on the outskirts of the lot. See, I was already thinking quick getaway, even though it was very unlikely anybody was going to make a serious move at me on neutral ground, especially neutral ground crammed to the rafters with major figures from both sides of our particular struggle. But the idea of trying to dodge the ghallu or his Lordship Eligor while waiting for the valet parking boys to find my car was enough to make sure I left Orban’s Benz out in the open. I only wished I could have parked it closer to one of the exits.
If you had walked into the Ralston’s lobby beside me, no matter how obtuse you might be about things supernatural, I’m pretty sure you’d still have noticed something was strange. For one thing, the guests milling beneath the high, decorated ceilings and the huge, ornate chandeliers all seemed to be either strikingly beautiful or so ugly it made your eyes sting. See, when the higher angels take human bodies, they almost always look gorgeous-androgynous, some of them, but still Hollywood handsome. They may dress like Mormons on Sunday (and most of them do) but it’s hard not to notice that little something extra they all have, the grace of movement and perfection of figure, even under a boring off-the-rack suit. And most of the demon lords like to cut an impressive figure, too…it’s just that among Hell’s officer corps that can go either way. Some of them are as gorgeous as the prettiest angels, so fine to look at that it could make you weep, and the only way you can tell that they aren’t Heaven’s is that they dress better, or at least more extravagantly. Their suits come in colors not found in nature (outside of a tropical orchid forest) and their hair is so fabulous that the coolest club kid would immediately give up, shave their heads, and get a job at Kentucky Fried Chicken. Rock star glamorous. But the rest of Hell’s representatives seemed to take a fierce pleasure in presenting the most disturbing facade imaginable, as long as it was (barely) within the bounds of human possibility.
Within seconds of stepping into the lobby, I saw a man as white as Foxy Foxy, but seven feet tall, and with abnormally long fingers, drinking from a glass that looked like a thimble in his hand; a burn victim (or at least someone who looked like a burn victim) swathed in bandages like Boris Karloff’s mummy; and a trio of starvation-slender women with smeared mascara and too-bright eyes. These last were the infamous Weeping Daughters, and I’d encountered them before in extremely weird circumstances. I’ll tell you about it someday, but I immediately changed direction so I wouldn’t have to walk too near them on my way to the registration desk.
The tall guy, the mummy, and the Daughters weren’t the only freaky ones by any means: about a third of the people in the lobby were so unusual that I wondered how management explained it to the staff. The Ralston lobby looked like someone was throwing a really dangerous Hallowe’en party right in the middle of a convention of FBI agents.
As I was checking in, relieved that my reservation was in order, so I wouldn’t have to spend too much time in the open where I was liable to be recognized by anyone I wanted to avoid, I saw a flurry of activity at the huge front door, bellboys and porters leaping into action like lifeguards who have just noticed a rich man drowning. They swung both glass doors open at the same time, then half a dozen stout fellows in Ralston’s grey livery began a strange charade of struggle. At first I thought they were trying to wrestle the world’s biggest bundle of luggage into the lobby and I wondered what kind of guest could possibly need so much stuff. But as they laboriously tugged and maneuvered the immense wheeled cart through the doors I suddenly realized that the world’s biggest bundle of luggage was actually the guest. He was huge-five-hundred-pounds-plus huge-and if he had a neck, the weight of his immense bald head had shoved it well down into his torso. He looked like nothing so much as the world’s largest bullfrog wrapped in a beige silk suit the size of a Mini Cooper.
A high-ranking hotel functionary, almost certainly the manager, hurried across the lobby toward the front entrance, managing to make a flat-out sprint look like Astaire easing onto a Rio dance floor. As he approached the monstrous pile of flesh, its dome-shaped head swiveled ever so slightly toward him, turret-like, and the tiny eyes glittered deep within the folds between brow and cheeks. I feared the hotel manager was going to be speared by a huge sticky tongue and swallowed, but instead the manager smiled like seeing this hideous goiter with a face was the nicest thing that had happened to him all month.
“Your Highness!” he cried. “It has been too long! Such an honor to have you with us again!” He clapped his hands and waved at the sweating bellboys who had just dragged this chariot of flabby filth into the lobby. “Please take the prince to the Roosevelt Suite!”
Prince, yes. Of Hell. That must be Sitri, I realized-the one who outranked even Eligor. The one Grasswax had gambled with and lost. And now that I’d seen him in the temporary but generous flesh, he looked even less like someone who’d enjoy being welched upon. Could he be a player in the whole golden feather thing, somehow? I wanted to know. Hell, I needed to know.
I intercepted the prince and his entourage just as they reached the freight elevator, the only thing big enough to carry him and the industrial-grade golf cart that trundled his bulk around. His fleshy fingers were as big as kielbasas, with several shimmering gold rings nestled deep in the folds of each digit. So much light bounced off them that if he had moved his hands around a little more they would have looked like troop transport planes coming in for a night landing, but they stayed folded across the immensity of his belly. Now, bear in mind that since this was only a temporary body, he could have looked like anyone he wanted to: Brad Pitt, Nijinsky, even the Reverend Billy Graham. But he chose to look like that. Chose. If that doesn’t give you a little insight into the monarchs of Hell, I don’t know what will.
Anyway, Sitri was one of the very highest of Hell’s high rollers, and if I’d had any sense I wouldn’t have even gone near him, but you already know I’m a bit deficient in that category. I figured I might never see the guy again outside of the conference room, and I wanted to see if I could shake loose any interesting information. Sometimes a surprise attack is the best way to do that.
“Excuse me!” I shouted, hurrying toward him. “Your Highness!” The bell staff were trying to angle him into the elevator, which required a great deal of stopping and starting of his cart, which someone other than Sitri himself must have been operating, since I never saw him move a single gelid muscle below the topmost of his chins. “Prince Sitri, I’d like a word with you.”
The eyes roll
ed toward me. They were black, all black, and shiny.
“Bobby Dollar,” the prince said, his voice like a cement mixer full of bowling balls and crude oil, so low that just listening to it made me feel like I was biting down on a manhole cover. “I know you, tiny fellow. But you have my name wrong.” His wide mouth frowned just a little, a downward feint in the center of a rubbery front nearly a foot wide. “I am Prince Sajatapandra.”
I really hated that he knew who I was. “Hey, fine,” I said. “Sat On A Panda, whatever name you want. To be honest, I don’t care if you call yourself Princess Grace of Monaco, I just want to talk to you for a moment…”
“Who are you?” the manager squeaked at me. He looked like he was having a minor coronary. “You cannot bother his Highness!” Two more huge but not at all flabby shapes stepped out of the elevator, luggage-laden bellhops scuttling out of their way like spooked mice, but Sitri only glanced at his bodyguards and they stopped just inside the door of the huge elevator, staring down at me with faces that wouldn’t have looked out of place on Easter Island. Either one of them could have torn me into bite-size pieces with his fingers alone.
“Go ahead, Dollar,” the fat thing said. “You have my attention. Of course, you may regret that at some later point.” Prince Sitri made a noise like a medium-sized brick wall collapsing into the mud; a laugh of sorts. He’d amused himself.
“Just wanted to ask you about a prosecutor named Grazuvac. The extremely late Darko Grazuvac. Or you may have known him better as Grasswax.”
At the sound of that name Sitri rolled his flinty little eyes toward the hotel manager, who was still as pink as a boiled crab. “You. Go away.”
The manager didn’t say a word, but obediently scuttled out of hearing distance and busied himself rearranging a perfect flower arrangement on one of the hall tables. Sitri rolled those gleaming shark-orbs back toward me. “Grasswax is dead. Seriously and thoroughly dead. But you probably knew that. So what about him, little angel?”
I didn’t see a flash of concern or guilt or anything in those eyes, but then I probably wouldn’t have even if he’d squeezed the life out of Grasswax with his own fat hands. You don’t get to be a prince of Hell without having a pretty damn good poker face. “I heard he owed you money, Prince. Or at least owed you something. Gambling debts.”
Again the doughy smile, and this time it was big enough for me to see the teeth behind it, each one filed into a perfect little point. If you ever crossed a piranha and a giant salamander and bombarded it with Gamma rays, Prince Sitri would probably be your first result. And your last. “Grasswax…gambling. Yes, I seem to remember he had a weakness for a flutter. He may even have lost to me a few times at the races. Are you suggesting that I would have him killed over such small change?” Again that titanic, stony chuckle; his chins didn’t stop moving for several seconds afterward. “Oh, my dear fellow, what an idea!” Then the smile vanished. The voice still sounded like a tank idling, but suddenly I could hear the full depth of the hatred his kind feel for my kind. It wasn’t a good feeling-just meeting his eyes made my stomach squirm. Sitri was a very, very old and very powerful demon. “And even if I had, little angel,” he said, the rumbling a notch louder than before, “what business of yours could it possibly be?”
For the first time, I really felt the breadth and depth of my own impulsive stupidity. Even though we were a little way from the main lobby down a hall, there was still plenty of traffic, most of the folk looking as though they belonged to one side in the great struggle or another. Every single one of them was now staring at us, most with the kind of expression zoo-goers wear when some crazy sonofabitch climbs over the rail into the grizzly bear enclosure. Still, it was too late to pretend I’d fallen in by accident.
“I heard that Grasswax had something of Eligor’s. Something special. You know Eligor, right? Tall fellow? Owns about three-quarters of this city?”
“Our host, you mean? Mr. Vald?” Fat Boy was suddenly smiling again. “Of course I know him. He owns this hotel, too.” My expression must have amused him, because he laughed again. “Oh, did you not know that?”
Eligor, the guy who wanted to murder me-if I was lucky-owned the Ralston? Now I felt like the grizzly bear was putting on his Kiss the Cook apron and firing up the barbecue, but I soldiered on. “Yeah, that guy. I wondered if you might be able to tell me whether Grasswax might have stolen that something from Eligor with the hope of paying his debt to you.”
“Ah.” He nodded, or at least compressed some of his chins. “So you’re not asking me whether I killed that punk Grasswax, you’re asking me whether my dear friend and colleague Grand Duke Eligor might have killed him?”
The manager was looking at his watch. He’d arranged the bejesus out of those flowers, and now he was getting nervously impatient again. I decided I’d already drawn enough potentially fatal attention to myself for one afternoon. “Yeah. I guess so. And?”
Sitri’s lips writhed in distaste like a pair of mating eels. “Grasswax was a fool who didn’t know his limitations.” A large gray-blue tongue crawled out from between the sharp little white pickets and moistened those lips, making the long, rubbery things look even more like sea creatures. “Anything that happened to him was richly deserved. He is not mourned or missed. And neither will you be, little angel.”
“Come along, your Highness.” It was the manager, bustling back into the midst of things as if invisibly signaled.
I couldn’t think of any way to dig myself in deeper so I gave him my best jaunty salute. “Right, then. Enjoy your stay.” As I turned away I could hear the freight elevator groan, indicating they had finally managed to maneuver Sitri into it.
So now I had a few more pieces to play with. Sitri knew Grasswax and I was sure he knew damn well why Grasswax had been so thoroughly dispatched, that was obvious. Now, demons lie constantly, but they also speak the truth if it suits them. His Flabbiness hadn’t minded talking about Grasswax, which meant he either enjoyed the fact that Eligor’s troubles were so well known, even if they reflected ever so slightly on himself, or he was as innocent of wrongdoing as a demon prince can ever be-at least, in the case of Grasswax’s messy and extremely painful death.
Or he might have felt certain he was talking to a dead man, so he didn’t need to be too coy. I couldn’t find much to cheer about in any of those possibilities, and the whole thing hadn’t got me closer to anything important, just guaranteed that yet one more of the nastiest bastards in this or any other universe was now thinking about me and my nosy nature.
Good one, Bobby.
thirty-one
something to my advantage
I hadn’t even made it back across the lobby to the guest elevators when a hand full of steely fingers closed on my arm. Startled, I clawed in my pocket for my concealed automatic even as I turned. Reflexes aside, I knew nobody was likely to attack me in the middle of the biggest summit for decades, but I was still relieved (slightly) to see that the person who’d stopped me was from my side. At least as far as I knew.
The angel holding my arm had the tanned, fit look of a mid-career military aviator. In fact, everything about him looked military, the creases in his expensive charcoal gray suit so sharp that it might as well have been a dress uniform.
“Slow down, son,” he said, and the iron grasp of his fingers made certain I did what he suggested.
I had never seen him wearing flesh and, in fact, had only seen him once in any form, but I hazarded a guess. “Karael?”
He didn’t bother to acknowledge it. “I saw your report. You’re testifying tomorrow, but I want a chat with you ahead of time.” The way he said “chat” made me think of rubber truncheons and other painful methods of ensuring team play, but I think that was just his style. “Now you’ve seen how hard these bastards will work to cover their tracks, to make it look like the breakdown is on our side.”
I looked around, worried about eavesdroppers, but if Karael wasn’t worried I decided I shouldn’t be either. Thi
s guy had been fighting the Opposition since before the Seventh Day; he must know what he was doing. In fact, that was what was worrying me more than any demons listening in. Still, I lowered my voice. “Hold on. You’re saying that this whole Third Way thing is a front? That the other side have been pilfering the souls, and that’s their cover?”
He frowned like I was a school kid who’d just spelled C-A-T-T. “I’m saying that we give them nothing for free, and that includes this conference. Tell the truth about what you saw when the first soul went missing, but don’t go overboard. Don’t give them anything else. Unless you have to.”
Nothing like directions from the top so vague that no matter what happened, it was still going to be my fault. I’m not an idiot, though, at least not most of the time, and I wasn’t going to argue with him about it in the middle of the Ralston lobby. In fact, I wasn’t going to argue with him at all. That’s one of the more pointless ways to spend your time with a higher angel. “Of course,” was what I said. “Can we go over it before I have to stand up in front of everybody?”
He nodded. “Excellent. Breakfast at 0800 local time. In that restaurant there. Are you paying attention, son?”
I had to tear my eyes away from his shoes, which were so shiny and deep black I thought I could actually see gravity bending inward around them. “0800.” I checked the sign. “Cafe Belmont.”
He looked my civilian clothes up and down. After the week I’d had, there might have been a few stains. “You’re not going to wear that, are you? We represent Heaven, son. The Highest.”
“I have a suit.”
“Good.” He paused as if considering what to say next. After the sniper-like efficiency and speed of his previous conversation it almost seemed out of character. “I’ve been checking up on you, Angel Doloriel.”
