by Tad Williams
“You look a little depressed, Dollar,” he said. “Found out your girlfriend went back to the guy with the power and the money, huh? Isn’t that too bad.”
“Howly, do me a favor and fuck off, will you?” I stood. “I don’t need you, and since we’re under truce I can’t do anything useful to you, so why don’t you go back to pissing around the edge of your tiny little territory and leave everything else to the grown-ups?”
His lip twitched back. He was in a mortal body, of course, but he still looked like his first impulse was to go for my throat with his teeth. “You think you’re something special, Dollar, but you’re not. You’re just dog shit to someone like Eligor.”
“And that’s your job, huh? Cleaning up the shit? Nice resumé-builder.”
He stared at me. His eyes, which at first had looked brown, now caught the light and gleamed deep red like a Sangiovese Grosso. “You wait, you little snot,” he said, just quietly enough to make sure everyone in the bar was trying to hear. “As soon as this conference ends, you’re mine. I’m going to eat your liver. And even your fancy girlfriend will forget you. She probably already has.”
It took every bit of self-control I had not to shove my fist right into his bushy-browed face. “Glad to hear you’re getting serious about your diet, Howly. But there’s no organ meat in the world with enough vitamins to wipe away all that ugly.”
I thought he might jump me as I walked off, and I almost wouldn’t have minded. There’s a certain therapeutic value in getting bloody (as long as you make sure the other guy gets bloodier). But all Howlingfell did was let out a snarling breath that sounded like a lion imagining the day the keeper would forget to lock the cage door.
By the time I got back to my room my phone was vibrating. All I really wanted to do was find out what would happen if I mixed all the little bottles left in the minibar together and downed the results, but out of long habit I dragged it out of my pocket to check the number, then answered.
“George, what’s up?” I’d almost forgotten I’d called Fatback. After seeing Caz I barely cared.
“Well, my fees, for one thing, if you keep leaving me these hurry-hurry-need-it-now messages.”
“George my friend, after Porky and the one in Lord of the Flies, you are the funniest pig ever.”
“I’m calling because you said you needed help.” He sounded hurt. Why is it that every time I feel like I’ve been gutshot by life, everybody else suddenly decides to get sensitive?
“Sorry. Rough evening. Thanks for calling back. Find anything yet?”
“I’m sending you specs on the Ralston. Yes, it’s another Vald Credit property. At least there are plenty of fire escapes.”
“That’s good, because right about now I wouldn’t mind burning the place down.” I flicked through the files just to make sure they’d all arrived. Schematics, emergency information that looked like it had been lifted straight out of the San Judas FD main server, all kinds of goodies. “Seriously, great work, George. That’s just what I needed.”
“You’re welcome, Mr. D.” He sounded cheerful again. “Any time.” Sometimes George seemed almost pathetically grateful for any kindness. I guess when you spend your entire thinking life in the body of a Majestic Large Black boar hog you’re going to have a bit of an inferiority complex. But even though Fatback was a good guy, I didn’t want to be talking to him or anyone just then, I wanted to be drinking myself unconscious.
“Anything else?” I prompted him. “About Leo, maybe?”
“Nothing other than what you already know, Bobby. There was a big stink at the time, in your circles, when he died, if you know what I mean. Lot of scuttlebutt, loose talk, folks who thought he’d been bumped off for asking too many questions or knowing things he wasn’t supposed to know. But I can’t find anything new. Oh, but speaking of dead guys…?”
I could almost hear the minibar calling to me—Oblivion, Doloriel, sweet oblivion—but I did my best to pretend patience. “Yeah?”
“That Habari guy you asked about? The one with the what’s-it-called society?”
I immediately became more focused. “Magians. Yeah? What do you mean, speaking of dead guys? Did he turn up in a morgue or something?”
“In a manner of speaking. But not recently.”
“Stop confusing me, George. I’m fucking exhausted.”
To his credit, Fatback didn’t sound offended this time. “Well, it’s not the same guy, obviously, but how many times do you run across a name like that? And a reverend, too?”
“Just tell me.”
“I found a guy who had the same name, first, middle, and last. And he was even a reverend. But he died seven years ago, almost eight, and he didn’t have anything to do with any Magian Society.” He gave me the details, which upset me considerably, because if I was going to figure out what all this new stuff meant I’d have to put off the drinking binge that had seemed like the only thing alluring enough to keep me alive until tomorrow.
I thanked him again and then called Clarence the Boy Angel. Although by my standards it wasn’t particularly late, I obviously woke the kid up. I wondered if the little company spy had gone to bed in his footie pajamas with his nice landlady reading him stories or something.
“Bobby?” He groaned. “What time is it?”
“Too late for you to be awake, obviously, so I’ll make it short.” If Sam was right I couldn’t trust him an inch, so I paused to figure out how best to phrase my question. “Look, when we went Upstairs and I had you look up all those names, did you only check the rolls of the living or whatever they call that stuff at Records?”
“Do you mean did I check dead people?” He sounded a little more awake now and cranky. “Of course I did. And I told you, I couldn’t find anybody by any of those names except that one guy, Jose Patrillo.”
Who was the ringer I’d put in to test him. So Habari was dead, but he wasn’t in Heaven’s records? What in the name of the Highest was going on around here? But just before I hung up, I thought of another question. “How far back did you look?”
“You mean how long in the past?”
“To see if any of them had died, yeah.”
He snorted. “Well, considering you told me that you’d just seen the guy in the flesh, I only went back a little way. I think I checked the deaths for the last couple of years in case he’d passed fairly recently but had been misfiled.”
So Fatback’s information was probably right, and the kid might even be telling the truth—about this, anyway. No matter what, though, things were getting very deep now, very deep indeed. “So you only went back maybe two years? If I told you somebody with that same name had died seven years ago right here in San Judas, that wouldn’t surprise you?”
“Somebody dies every few seconds, and lots of people share names, Bobby.” It sounded like he was getting impatient with me. It made an interesting contrast. “No, that wouldn’t surprise me very much at all.”
“Okay. Thanks, kid.” I almost asked him why our bosses had set him to snoop on me, but I also knew it was a bad idea to show him my hand. Never give up anything for free. “Go back to bed.”
“You sound like shit, Bobby.” He actually sounded concerned—an actor to the end. “I think you’re the one who needs to get some rest.”
“Oh, yeah. Soon as I can find some quarters for the vibrating bed.”
But I knew now that despite having to meet the scary soldier angel for breakfast at eight o’clock sharp (not an hour of the day I particularly enjoy even at the best of times) I wasn’t going to get a lot of sleep because there was too damn much to think about. The world I’d thought I knew was proving to be an even more dubious proposition than I’d figured, and I’d always thought of myself as a cynic. Plus, just to make my happiness complete, after breakfast I was going to be interrogated by the biggest powers on both sides of our permanent war—a great chance to make new enemies.
I locked the minibar to force temptation to work harder, since I could no longer af
ford to get slaughterously drunk. The sound of that key turning in its tiny little lock seemed like one of the saddest sounds I’d ever heard.
thirty-three
the odor of violent subtext
SEVEN MINUTES after eight in the morning is not my favorite time of day, and adding lukewarm scrambled eggs and the hard face of Karael only a cup of coffee and a grapefruit away didn’t do much to improve it.
“Sit up, Angel Doloriel. This restaurant is full of creatures who spend their entire miserable existence looking for any sign of weakness on our side, and you’re slouching like a school child who forgot to bring in his homework.”
My problem was that I had brought my homework to the summit conference, and it had kept me up half the night. The alternative had been to spend the wee hours of the morning cursing Fate and wondering what Caz was doing back with her ex, a monster who didn’t even have Hitler’s fondness for dogs. But I couldn’t tell that to the general, of course, so I just nodded. “Sorry. Up late. Working.”
“This is your work, Angel Doloriel. In a little over twenty minutes you’re going to be in there with the big boys, and so far, I’m underwhelmed by your effort.” His mouth tightened into a very thin line. “There’s egg on your lapel.”
I brushed it off and did my best to transfer the rest of it from plate to mouth more carefully as Karael explained again, for the third time since I’d stepped out of the elevator, what I was supposed to say and not say.
“The report you sent about this Third Way nonsense does not officially exist, Advocate,” he explained again. “It’s being held back until after the conference is over. We don’t want to start something before we know all the facts.”
“But why are we having a summit, then?” I noticed that thinning line again and wiped my mouth with my napkin. “Isn’t the Third Way exactly the sort of thing that should be…um…discussed with the Opposition?”
The line quirked up on one end. “You think so? That this is all about getting to the truth? Son, if we always let actual truth turn into official truth this cold war of ours would have turned hot a long time ago. You remember Sodom and Gomorrah? Or at least heard of them? Well, just change the names to Rio or Berlin or Shanghai, imagine those burned to the ground tomorrow with millions of casualties just for starters, and you’ll have some idea of why you’re going to do what you’re told.”
Ten minutes later, I was marched into the Ralston’s Elysium Ballroom, sometimes known as the Cloud Room because of the billowing, cloudy sky painted across the high ceiling. Packing his demon cohorts and angelic enemies into such a room must have amused Grand Duke Eligor to no end, and it was packed. A few hundred were grouped around the various tables, although most of their chairs had already been turned for a better view of the stage, where the main business would take place at a long table set with microphones. Other than Karael beside me, the main movers for both sides were already in place: Eremiel, our Heavenly expert on Hell, whose rawboned face and longish hair gave him the look of a nineteenth-century abolitionist preacher, very much in tune with the Gilded Age setting. The third of the important angels had to be Phanuel, the famous Angel of Exorcism, but by the standards of the Elysium Ballroom he was not very interesting to look at, just another Hollywood male lead in a sober suit.
As expected, the Opposition was visually a bit more interesting. Once you could stop staring at the jellied mass of Prince Sitri you noticed Adramelech, one of the old, bad ones, who had done less than the rest to pass as human. From a distance he looked okay, just an old man in a black suit with a skin color that suggested lots of sunlamp time. Only when you got a little closer could you see that what covered his face looked less like skin and more like a mask of sandstone, yellow and granular. The only things that moved in that stony mask were the eyes, black and liquid as tar. Just seeing the stillness with which he waited for things to start made it clear how big this all was. Adramelech scared me. Badly.
The last of the satanic negotiators was also the most ordinary looking, dressed in a sharp bespoke suit and wearing a pair of black-rimmed hipster glasses like an entertainment industry lawyer. This was Caym, another heavy hitter, president of the main Council of Hell and one of the smartest in the Opposition’s stable. What interested me, though, was that according to Fatback’s grapevine he was also Eligor’s mouthpiece, pushing the Grand Duke’s agenda in the deadly arena of infernal politics. I decided I needed to keep a close eye on him for clues to what Eligor had in mind.
Many others were on the stage with them, the great and good (or nasty and bad) of both sides. Terentia and Chamuel, both part of the Ephorate that had grilled me in Heaven, were there in human form, as were many other angels and demons I didn’t immediately recognize.
“Don’t gawk,” Karael said sharply into my ear. “I’m going up there now. There’s a seat for you in the second row with your name on it. Sit there, keep your mouth shut, and remember everything I told you.”
As the Angel Militant climbed the steps to the stage, his back straight as the shortest distance between two points, I found the chair marked “Dollar” and slipped into it. Like a wedding between the Hatfields and McCoys the audience had been seated by affiliation, and I was happier than I’d been in a while to be surrounded by fellow employees of the Highest.
With Karael in place the conference finally lurched into life. Adramelech—acting as chairman because we were on the Opposition’s home ground—gave the opening remarks, a blur of verbiage that managed to be both dryly politic and yet clearly menacing, with several comments about “temporarily putting aside our very real differences to address the mutual problem.” Eremiel spoke for our side and managed to be succinct and even occasionally funny, as when he referred to the chairman as the “honorable Adramelech—which must be the first time those words have been spoken together.” Even a couple of the Hellspawn grinned at that.
And of course before they could depose anybody there were more speeches, about an hour-and-a-half’s worth. It seemed like everybody who’d ever been fitted for a halo or issued a pitchfork had to have their say. The delegates from Hell seemed to range along a continuum from the noisily nasty ones, who were like professional bigots, complaining about how really it was their side that was misunderstood and stigmatized, to your basic politburo thugs, the sort of bureaucrats who signed orders for torture and execution and then paused for a catered lunch before going back to work. Their basic stance on the entire Heaven/Hell conflict was “Lies, lies, all lies. We will bury you someday.”
My side had its own version of this kind of crap, of course, but the range was more like militant Christian war hawks at one extreme, and gray little European Union bureaucrats at the other. Either way, by the time the preliminaries ended a whole lot of nothing had been said, but the massive ballroom stank with the odor of violent subtext. The only thing that had been made definitively clear was that neither side was taking the blame for the missing souls. Then the parade of witnesses began.
I tried to stay focused—you never knew when some little slip would turn out to be important—but with pride of their hosting privileges, the other guys went first and called up a numbing stream of minor infernal bureaucrats to explain all the ways they had noticed something amiss without in any way conceding that they might have made an error and without giving away anything substantial about Hell’s internal procedures. In short, a snore-fest. No doubt following the official party line, most of Hell’s deponents hinted darkly that only the Highest, who liked to make His own rules, could pull off such a thing. The only one that really caught my attention was a scrawny under-devil who even in human form looked like he’d lose an arm-wrestling match to Olive Oyl. He said that some nameless archdemonic supervisor had assured him that the souls must be hidden in some Heavenly safe house right here on Earth, like high-value defectors, because other than Upstairs or Downstairs there was nowhere else to go.
“The Tartarean Convention specifically states that no new territory can be opened without t
he consent of both Heaven and Hell,” he said piously. “And such a thing has never happened. I looked it up.”
While a few of the audience on the other side of the ballroom chuckled at this wet-behind-the-horns simpleton, I sat forward in my chair. A puzzle piece that had been sitting prominently to the side of my unfinished mental jigsaw, a piece labeled “Why the feather?” suddenly seemed to have found its place. I snuck a look up at Eligor, who sat at the back of the stage with other infernal dignitaries, but his calm smirk was unchanged. Nevertheless, his friend Caym quickly ended the skinny demon’s testimony and sent him back to sit with his catcalling comrades. I wondered if Eligor was even now imagining how that gawky, talkative underling would look as demonic macrame, á la the late Grasswax.
Soon it was Heaven’s turn to bore everyone in the room to death, although Sam’s testimony provided a few entertaining moments when he followed a bunch of Heaven’s least forthcoming pencil-pushers into the witness chair. Adramelech seemed interested in hearing what he had to say, but Caym just looked focused and blank, while Prince Sitri, who had barely spoken, continued his imitation of the world’s largest melted candle.
“You were the first of your cohorts to receive the summons to the death scene of Edward Walker, were you not?” Adramelech asked Sam.
“I certainly was,” Sam drawled.
“Why didn’t you obey?”
“Other than my documented allergy to work?” Sam paused to let the quiet laugh die away on both sides. “Because I was busy training a new recruit, and he was very eager to learn the ropes.” He nodded as if remembering a sunny day on the river when the fish were biting. “Yes, sir, these young fellows, they’re much more aggressive and impatient than we were. Wild young guys. I’d hate to be in the Opposition’s shoes when they get the reins in their hands…” He broke off as if he’d said too much, but his grin said, We’re having fun now, huh?
Adramelech was not intimidated and certainly not amused. His wet black eyes were like puddles of tar on a beach. “Stick to the questions, little angel.” His voice was as dry as Thirst itself. “Did you answer the summons?”
