by Greg Bear
It took another few minutes for the svartálfar to haul the howdah onto one of the goats and get it fastened in place. Then, he reached back into the sack and hauled out something that looked like a fireplace poker. I recognized the device, although I couldn’t remember what it was called. It was the tool used by mahouts to drive elephants.
Sure enough, a few seconds later he was perched in a mahout’s position behind the goat’s head, straddling its neck, and looking down at us with a sneer on his face. “What? You expect me to help you up, too?”
The jury-rigged howdah had a rope ladder hanging down from one side. Loren and I used it to climb aboard. No sooner had we gotten into the howdah than Ingemar set the goat in motion. Looking back, I could see the second one following. Apparently it would do so on its own, without a lead rope.
“We’ll switch mounts after a few hours,” Loren explained. “The beasts are tougher’n you’d believe, but they’ll still get tired in this sort of terrain.”
I looked ahead, and then to the sides. The terrain seemed identical anywhere you looked and I couldn’t detect any sign of a trail. “Are you sure we’re headed in the right direction?”
Loren sniffed. “As Ingemar said, don’t teach grandmothers to suck eggs. First, the finding spell we used is the most reliable in existence. Second, Ingemar and the goats can find their way almost anywhere in Hell. Third, I know what I’m doing.”
“An accomplished witch yourself, I take it.”
“Me?” She gave me a look that somehow managed to be aloof and sly at the same time. “I haven’t been a virgin since I was fifteen. If I’d even tried to apply to a good witch’s program in college they’d have laughed at me. No, I’m a diplomat. What do you expect from the State Department? Think of me as a roving ambassador, if it makes you feel better.”
It didn’t. I didn’t know exactly what the skill set of a diplomat consisted of, but I was pretty sure damn few of the skills would be any use here in the hell universe. Your average demon’s idea of “negotiating” is arguing over whether you’ll enter the monster’s maw headfirst or feetfirst.
The remark about virginity kick-started my sternly suppressed single-male curiosity. As usual, this manifested itself in the form of a shifty-eyed glance and a suave “Aaaah . . .”
She chuckled. “I’m heterosexually inclined, single—divorced; not never married—currently unattached. Monogamous when I am, and no, I don’t fool around. You?”
I cleared my throat. “Aaah . . . The same.”
“Divorced for how long?”
“Two years. Not quite. Twenty-two months.”
“It’s been a little over three years for me. Okay, so divorce-shock shouldn’t be too much of a problem. It’s a deal, then. If you’re still interested when this is over, ask me out on a date. The answer will be ‘yes.’ I’ve decided you’re kind of cute, for a slavering carnosaur from the Cretaceous.”
“Aaah . . . ”
“Good thing one of us is a diplomat. Or are you under the delusion that a monosyllable is a good pickup line?” She flashed me a grin. “Get used to it, if you decide you’re interested. Fair warning—I can be really annoying. Everyone says so. My ex-husband thinks the warning should be tattooed on my forehead. Every supervisor I’ve ever had would probably agree except for those who think it should be branded there. My friends, on the other hand, think a tattoo on the shoulder ought to be good enough if I agreed to always wear sleeveless dresses or tank tops.”
A loud hoot from ahead drew our attention. Looking in that direction, we saw that a creature had emerged from the brush and was standing in our path. It looked more-or-less like a misshapen weightlifter with the head of an eagle and talons instead of fingers on its hands. At a guess, it weighed somewhere around four hundred pounds although that might be an over-estimate. Some demons with avian or partly avian morphologies have hollow bones.
“You gotta love this place,” I said. “It’s as predictable as the menu in a fast food joint.”
“This monster being . . . ?”
I vaulted over the lip of the howdah and landed lightly on my feet. Well, allowing for a little squelch. Looking up, I saw that Loren was staring at me with surprise. Because of my size, people who don’t know me don’t realize how athletic I am. If I weren’t just plain too massive, I’d have been an Olympic-level gymnast. As you’d expect, of course, given my genes.
“It’s some variety of nisroch,” I said. “This shouldn’t take long.”
It didn’t.
A few minutes after we’d set back underway, Loren cleared her throat. “Well, I’d been thinking of recommending a nice sushi place for our date, but I guess that’s not a good idea.”
I grinned. “Rolled-up little fishie bits and tofu are really not my style. I’m pretty much a steakhouse kind of guy.”
“Do you always eat the organs?”
“You have to stay away from the liver and spleen, with almost any kind of demon, and the hearts are just plain indigestible even for me. Other than that, though, yeah. The intestines are especially good because the hell universe has its own diseases and devil guts are the best source of antibiotics. Using the term loosely.”
“But I’d think it must taste . . . ”
“Horrible? Yeah, sure. But I’m eating them in raptor form. Think I care?”
That sly grin came back. I was starting to get fond of it, I decided, even though I could see where it might be annoying if you were in the wrong mood.
“I was wondering why the DIA had you listed as one of their top field agents,” she said. “It’s because you don’t need much in the way of supplies. How many people can live off the land in Hell?”
“Not too many. In my defense, though, most of my rating is because of my brains. Believe it or not.”
Her expression got more thoughtful. “Actually, I don’t doubt that at all.”
There came another loud sound from ahead of us. A screech, you might call it. A couple of seconds later, a huge falcon came flying into sight. It perched on a branch in a nearby tree, that sagged under the weight. Then, jerked its head around a few times and vomited a snake.
The snake landed on the soggy soil below and wriggled toward us. When it was no more than ten feet from the goat, it raised its head, jerked it around a few times, and puked up a toad. No sooner did the toad land on the ground than it made a prodigious hop onto one of the goat’s horns and from there hopped onto the front side of the howdah.
That done, it jerked its head back and forth a few times—
“Oh, give me a break!” I said. Loren hurriedly leaned away from it.
—and vomited up a . . .
Louse? It sure looked like it.
The louse reared up and started speaking, in a much louder voice than you’d ever imagine such a tiny creature could produce. It sounded like gibberish to me, but Loren had a look of intent concentration on her face. I realized she was able to understand what it was saying.
Who the hell speaks louse? I didn’t even know the pests had a language.
When the louse finally finished, Loren turned to me with a frown on her face. “What I was afraid of. That idiot Boatright managed to wander into a Mesoamerican region of the hell universe. A Mayan analog, at a first approximation. Of all the places to look for allies against the forces of evil!”
I understood her point. None of the early pagan religions were what you’d call filled with the milk of human kindness. But even in that crowd, the Mesoamerican deities and spirits were blood-curdling.
Literally, in many cases. The underlying belief system that had created them had for its main premise the idea that the universe was kept going by the gods, and the only thing that kept the god themselves going was being fed with human blood. Human blood drawn from pain and suffering, to boot. No blood bank donors need apply. The blood had to come with shrieks of agony or it wasn’t worth anything.
I dredged up what I knew about the mythos involved. If this region of the hell universe bore a
close approximation to the Mayan region, I was pretty sure it would be ruled by the Lords of Xibalba. A cheery crowd, that lot. Among them would be a god of pain, a god of disease, a god of pus, a god of emaciation, a god of jaundice—you get the picture?
Loren’s next words confirmed my guess:
“The louse is a messenger from the Lords of Xibalba. It says if we want to get Boatright and his people back we need to—”
“Undergo a series of tests. Yeah, I know. That’s a pretty standard feature of this mythos.”
It was clear from the expression on her face that she was familiar with it herself. “It is, indeed,” she said. “Some of them will be straightforward tests of skill, but some will be ordeals and all of them are likely to be full of tricks.”
“You do realize that there’s already not much left of Boatright and his people? Not here.”
She nodded. “Yes, I know.”
“So why go on? I vote for an ignominious retreat.”
“We can’t. It’s tempting, but . . . ” She shook her head. “The problem is that too many of our netherworld alliances with pagan forces are based on rigid honor codes. Their codes, not ours, but if they start thinking we’re prone to quitting when the going gets tough, the alliances will get frayed at the very least.”
I put on my best sneer. “Who cares? There’s a reason those silly buggers went out of business. Several reasons, actually. ‘Rigid honor code’ is probably right at the top.”
She smiled thinly. “Oh, not right at the top. But I agree it’s up there. It still doesn’t matter, Anibal. We can’t afford to lose those alliances, with all the chaos that’s still reverberating from the collapse of the Johannine church after the Matuchek Incident.”
Since she was officially in charge of the expedition, my vote didn’t really matter. “Okay, you’re the boss. Is this parasite our guide, or do we have to find our own way to the examination hall?”
“There’ll be a guide of some sort, but not the louse. The creature was pretty vague—whoa!”
The howdah was lurching around wildly. The goat carrying it was bleating and the goat following was already half out of sight racing back in the direction from which we’d come. For his part, Ingemar was holding onto the goat’s horns for dear life. He’d lost his prod in the process.
We were rising, too, very quickly. I looked down to see what was causing that, and then wished I hadn’t.
The reason we were rising was because we were on the back of a gigantic crocodile. About the size of a battleship.
“And here we go,” said Sophia.
3
The crocodile carried us for what I’d estimate was thirty miles—keeping in mind that the term “estimate” means exactly that, and under hell conditions to boot. Given the beast’s size, though, that didn’t take more than an hour or so. (See caveat concerning estimates above, with the added caution that watches are completely unreliable in the infernal regions.)
Eventually, we arrived in front of a great pit, at the bottom of which an enormous drunken revelry was taking place. There were about four hundred drunkards down there, not one of whom looked to be older than ten or eleven. They were all boys, too. Not a girl in sight.
“The Four Hundred Boys,” said Sophia. “We’re in a Mayan mythos, sure enough. Close analog, anyway. We won’t go any further until one of us joins the celebration.”
She turned to Ingemar. “Your job, this is.”
He was already climbing over the side of the howdah, looking quite cheerful. “Good luck on the rest of your trip. Better you than me, heh! I’ll be partying hard in support, be sure of it.”
Once off the goat and on the crocodile, the svartálfar scampered down its spine until he reached the tip of the tail. From there, it wasn’t too bad of a leap down to the ground. As soon as he was off, the crocodile started moving around the pit.
My knowledge of the Mayan mythos was on the sketchy side. “Who are the Four Hundred Boys?”
“The gods of drunkenness. Or the gods of alcoholic drinks, depending on the translation. The reason they’re boys, according to State’s scholars, is probably because they can’t hold their liquor at all. The reason there are four hundred of them is probably to make sure not all of them are passed out at once. So far as we can tell, their diplomatic function is to waylay visitors, get them plastered, and then play nasty tricks on them. ‘Nasty’ as in frequently fatal or disfiguring.”
“This is a diplomatic function?”
She grinned. “Leaving aside the murder and mayhem, it’s really not too different from what happens at cocktail parties in embassies.”
Not more than two miles past the pit, the crocodile came to a halt again. This time, in front of a large stone building. It swung its tail around until the tip of it was just before the building’s only visible entrance.
The hint was obvious. So, Loren and I got out of the howdah and copied Ingemar’s method of leaving the crocodile. As soon as we reached the ground, the gigantic reptile started moving away.
I was a little sorry to see it go. Despite its fearsome appearance, the monster had been perfectly well-behaved and I hadn’t worried about being waylaid by anything while we were on top of it. Not even Hell’s creatures are likely to pester something that size.
There being nothing else to do, we passed through the entrance. It wasn’t a door, just a tall and narrow corridor through the stones that made up the structure. We emerged into a chamber about fifty feet across. Sitting on stools in a semi-circle at the opposite end were fourteen beings, staring at us.
I use the term “beings” because I can’t think of anything more suitably vague that still conveys intelligence. The appearance of the fourteen figures varied wildly in every manner except one: they were all hideous.
You were expecting something else from the gods of pus, pestilence, etc? Trust me, you don’t even want to think what the god of hemorrhoids looked like.
“At a guess,” I said, “we’re looking at the Lords of Xibalba.”
Sophia snorted. “You think?”
“What now?”
“I’m not sure. We need to greet all of them by name, if I remember the protocol, or we’ll be in immediate trouble. But there’s bound to be a trick involved.”
“How good are you with languages?”
“That’s one of my specialties. I’m not technically a witch, but my abilities when it comes to speaking in tongues are magical. For all practical purposes, I can understand any language after I’ve heard a few words spoken. Don’t ask me how, because I don’t know.”
The germ of an idea came to me. A crudely direct idea, I admit, but what else do you expect from a theropod?
“Okay, then. Let’s see what happens.” I pulled out my flash and made the change.
Once in raptor form, I sprang over to the nearest Lord of Xibalba and smelled it. For me, in that form, smelling mostly meant licking it with my tongue.
At a guess, this one was the god of vomit. There was no way I could have made myself smell the thing, much less lick it with my tongue, if I’d still been in human form. But theropods are to fastidiousness what monkeys are to decorum. In a word, oblivious.
I then sprang over to the next one. At a guess, after a couple of licks, this one was the god of edema.
The third one, even before my tongue could examine it, I figured to be the god of acne. But before my tongue reached it, the Lord of Xibalba waved me off frantically and started gibbering something at its fellow gods.
I swiveled my head to look at Sophia. She had that same expression of intent concentration that she’d had when she was listening to the louse. So, seeing no further role to play at the moment, I squatted down in front of the semi-circle.
When a human squats, he looks more harmless than usual. Not so, for a Deinonychus. He looks like he’s about to spring into action.
All of the lords except the two at the far end were now gibbering wildly. Those two, on the other hand, were as inert as if they’d been m
ade of the same stone the building was.
Which, as it turned out, they were.
“Okay,” said Sophia. “I’ve learned all their names by now, since they used them in jabbering at one another.” She pointed at the two silent ones. “Those are phonies. Mannequins. The other twelve . . . ”
She moved to the center of the chamber, bowed, and addressed each one of the Lords in turn. I didn’t understand any of it, but I found out later that the names were such charming monickers as One Death, Seven Death, Blood Gatherer—no St. Francis types in this crowd.
When she finished, the twelve real Lords of Xibalba starting gibbering again. After a few minutes of that, the racket died down and all of them looked at one of the Lords near the center of the semi-circle. This one was marginally less ugly than the others—you understand this doesn’t mean much? like being the best-dressed hog in a pigsty—but made up for it by having a smoking obsidian mirror embedded in its forehead.
Smoking Mirror leaned forward on its stool and gibbered something at Sophia. She gibbered back, he gibbered, she gibbered, eventually they were done.
She came over to where I stood. By then, I’d changed back to human form.
“It’s about what we figured,” she said. “They’ll hand Boatright and his people over to us if we pass some tests. To judge our worth—and don’t ask me how they gauge worth in the first place, I haven’t got a clue.”
“How many tests?”
“They’re being vague about that. Essentially, one test for every human they hand over. But for some reason they seem unable or unwilling to specify an exact number.”
I frowned. “There’s a gimmick in there, somewhere. Boatright had three people with him. Even monster gods dedicated to diseases should be able to count up to four.”
