by Tad Williams
Give me a break. It’d been a long week. A very long week.
Oxana was still angry with me, but she had the good grace not to make a big thing of it, so I didn’t have to look like some old guy ditching his young girlfriend, or worse, somebody sending his wife-by-mail back to Mother Russia because he was pissed she had the wrong color hair or something.
“But how will I know what you do?” she asked. “If you die or no?”
“Well, that depends, but since you gave me your address I can always write to you. Or even email. You guys have email in the Ukraine, right?”
She gave me that look young women always give embarrassing older men, no matter what we’ve said or done. “Yes, stupid. We have car and email and even airplane.”
“No, you don’t, or I wouldn’t have to send you out on a Polish carrier.”
“You are head-butt.”
Once she’d finished eating, we still had a while to go before I could put her through security with a good conscience, so we took a last walk around the concourse. San Jude doesn’t have quite as many tourist attractions or sports teams as San Francisco, so the gift shops always seem a little impoverished by comparison. We had the Cougars, of course, who had been there forever, but they were a minor league baseball team. We were going to get an NHL franchise next year, and a contest had already been held to pick the name. The winner had been “Narwhals,” which I wasn’t quite sure about, but the shops were already stocking merchandise in the team’s projected purple, green, and gold; the stuff with the official logo, a narwhal smashing up through ice, and the less official stuff, like a cartoon narwhal on a t-shirt I saw that said, “I’M HORNY. PUCK ME!”
SJ International’s also got the usual airport array of weird local foods—you can mail frozen empanadas to your friends back home in Kansas!—and other odd businesses that only grow in airports, like vending machines full of overpriced phone chargers and earbuds and whatnot. Oxana actually bought a couple of these things (I’d given her a few hundred bucks for the road, to make sure she could get transportation back to the Scythian camp in the mountains.) She and Halyna probably would have enjoyed a trip to Bender Electronics or one of the megabox stores, I realized now. I felt bad I hadn’t taken them there instead of the gun warehouse and the fucking fatal museum.
Airports are weird places. Actually, they remind me a little bit of Heaven—not, God knows, because they’re so lovely, but more because everybody’s kind of off on their own little trip, surrounded by their own bubble, like the cheerful but not particularly chatty souls Upstairs. I’m sure people meet and make lifetime friends in airports, but I can’t imagine it happening to me. Too disconnected. Too . . . airport-ish.
After we walked in glum silence for a little while, I led Oxana to the security gate and hugged her, then watched until she’d gone all the way through the scanners and out the other side. I wasn’t treating her like a child—more like a hardened criminal. If I’d just dropped her off at the airport she would probably have traded in her ticket, turned right around, and the next thing I heard of her would have been the bombing of some local Iranian Community Center. She didn’t want to hurt any Persians except the goddess herself, of course, but she really wanted to bring some pain to Anaita. As it was, I wasn’t a hundred percent certain she wouldn’t sneak out again once I’d left, but short of flying to Kiev with her, I’d done all I could, and I was desperate for some private thinking time.
My phone rang on the way back, but I was busy trying not to get crushed between a very large furniture truck and someone entering the Bayshore right in front of me at about thirty miles an hour. A couple of miles later I pulled off the freeway and parked at a gas station to check the message.
It was from Sam. You know the expression, “death warmed over”? He sounded like death had been warmed until it caught fire and had to be extinguished with a tenderizing mallet. Like a man who’d been gassed in the World War One trenches and had only just learned to talk again.
“I hate myself, Dollar. More than I hate you. Fuck you and your friendship and good sense and seeing the other side of things. Fuck alla that. You’re still a rat bastard. Remember when you ate all my Baja Nachos while I was in the restroom that time? Yeah. So fuck yourself. Head for Neverland. Write your name on the mirror in blood. Yes, blood, asshole. Then step through.
“I’m going to go shoot myself now. I just remembered that the worst part of drinking is the sobering up. Did I already tell you to fuck yourself? I hope so, ‘cause my head hurts too much to say it now.”
And then he’d hung up.
Believe it or not, this was a good thing, despite the death’s-door sound effects. This was Sam forgiving me, in his own Samlike way, and telling me how to join him in Kainos. Which was good, because a plan I’d been thinking about for the last few hours was beginning to take practical shape, and I really did think I was going to need to visit Sam’s compromised paradise. The plan was a completely crazy one with almost no chance of working, but time was running out. So, as far as useful ideas, well, let’s just say the new one didn’t have much competition.
The more I thought about it as I made my way south on the rain-slicked freeway, the more certain I became that I was either a genius or the biggest idiot ever to tape a “Just Kill Me” sign to his own back. And not only was the idea itself astoundingly dangerous, every step on the way to implementing it was crazy suicidal, too. But it was the first decent possibility that had occurred to me since we’d escaped the Stanford Museum, bloodied, beaten, and carrying nothing but the dead body of a young Ukrainian woman.
Look, let’s be honest, I don’t have that many ideas. I don’t have any good ones (as Sam would be the first to tell you) but even if you ignore quality, I don’t have that many of them, so I wanted to start putting this one together. Unfortunately, I realized as I was passing the first of the San Judas exits, I needed one major component to make it work, and that wasn’t going to be easy to get. It would require me striking a bargain with someone who might be even stronger than Anaita, and who had certainly proved that he hated me as much as she did.
Yeah, you see where this is going, and yeah, you’re right. It was stupid in dozens of different ways. Suicidal, too. But it’s not like I had a lot to lose. One way or another, someone was going to rip my soul out of my body soon—mainly just a question of who and when and how official it would be—so heading for Five Page Mill to visit Grand Duke Eligor was just giving the executioner a choice of weapons.
That doesn’t mean I wasn’t terrified, of course. Doesn’t mean that at all.
forty
devil you know
I HADN’T BEEN inside Five Page Mill since my first meeting with its owner, which had ended badly (with me being dragged out by the police) but much less badly than it could have, since only a few minutes earlier I had been dangling in the neck-grip of a very, very angry archdemon, Eligor the Horseman. And now I was going back. It would have been questionable strategy even if I hadn’t had several encounters with Eligor since, including a long stint in Hell as his prisoner, during which he tortured me continuously for what felt like months, burning me, shredding me, feeding me to things I couldn’t even describe, and resurrecting me each time to start over again with something new. So now I was going to visit him again. See what I mean? Would you like yours Regular Stupid, sir, or Extra Stupid? But beggars, choosers, blah blah blah.
I’d gone in stealthy the first time, and it had turned out very badly. Today I was going to try something different. In fact, the only thing I did by the normal Bobby book was leave my hideous yellow ex-taxicab out on the Camino Real, since I didn’t want my current ride to be known to every creature in San Judas with a picture of Satan on its office wall. But once I’d reached the front walkway I just moseyed inside and went straight to the main reception desk. It was now behind bulletproof glass, which was probably because of me, but that didn’t keep the young man behind it from giving me a pl
easant smile.
“How may I help you?”
“I’m here to see Mr. Vald.”
He gave the smallest hint of a surprised look, but for frontline office cannon-fodder, he coped pretty well. “Let me just check. Do you have an appointment, sir?”
“No, I don’t think so. But he’ll want to see me.”
“I’m afraid you’ll have to arrange it through Mr. Vald’s executive assistant.”
“No, you’ll do that for me.” I put one of my cards through the slot, the kind that only has a name and a phone number on it. I don’t think that number even works any more. “Tell them it’s Bobby Dollar to see Ken Vald. I’ll wait right here.”
And I did. The receptionist’s phone conversation, which I observed from a discreet distance, looked a bit heated. My guess was that the person on the other end had started out, “Who?” and then quickly got to, “What the fuck is he doing here?”
When the kid hung up, I strolled forward again. “Shall I go up?”
His smile was sickly, but he was still doing his best, bless him. I hoped he was a regular human and didn’t know who his boss really was. He seemed like a go-getter. “If you’ll just wait a moment, Mr. Dollar, someone will be out to see you.”
“I’m sure,” I said, returning his smile with more confidence than I actually felt. But that’s how it works when you’re on Hell’s home ground, even if it’s just an embassy on Earth. You have to stay confident, or at least seem that way. You cannot flinch. You definitely do not want to panic, because they really do smell fear.
It was a minute at the longest before a dark-haired female security agent appeared out of one of the lobby’s interior doors. She was attractive, if you liked faces hard as stone temple carvings, and wore the same black suit as the male agents, but with a buttoned collar and no tie. Her nametag said “Kilburn.”
“Mr. Dollar?” she asked. “Bobby Dollar?” You’d have thought from the way she said it that I’d announced myself as something filthy. “I think you’d better come with me.”
“I think first you’d better tell me where, Officer Kilburn.” I gave her my best array of charm-teeth, my friendliest grin. “The last time I was here, I had a bit of a misunderstanding with security. I’d hate that to happen again.”
Zero amusement. Less than that, actually. If a cold fog could reach out from someone and suck the enjoyment out of others, that’s what she was emanating. “I’m sure you would, Mr. Dollar. I’m taking you to my supervisor. Come along.”
She turned and walked back toward the door. She didn’t look to see if I was coming, and didn’t seem to care if I did. I followed her anyway, since that was why I was there.
A whole complex of narrow halls and rooms lay hidden behind the lobby wall, almost a second building inside Five Page Mill, like a piece of pipe shoved inside a larger pipe. She led me down a corridor that must have run more or less parallel to the lobby’s inner walls, then stopped outside a door no different than the half dozen others we’d passed. She opened it and indicated I should go inside. “Mr. Felderscarp will be with you in a moment.”
I stepped inside. She closed the door. It was a small, unremarkable office—a desk, chairs on either side of it, no pictures. Just as I’d figured out that Felderscarp must be Fiddlescrape, Eligor’s latest demon bodyguard, replacement for the very much unlamented Howlingfell, the door opened again behind me. I turned in time to get hit so hard in the stomach that I thought someone had fired a rocket launcher right into my gut. I slammed back against the wall and for a second everything went black. Then the little sparkle-lights appeared, and I could hear well enough again to detect the sound of someone strangling to death trying to swallow a porcupine. That was me, I realized a couple of seconds later, trying to get some air into my body.
Something very large stood over me, flexing giant claws. It seemed to tower yards and yards above me—not possible in that small office. Only as the first of the new oxygen got into my cells, and my brain coughed back into more or less working condition, did I realize it was only tall Fiddlescrape, with his huge fists and his small head, which made my perspective from the floor even stranger.
Of course, sheer reflex already had me planning how to bring him down—a kick in the knee, hard as I could, to be followed by crumpling his cantaloupe-sized head with the chair I’d knocked over on my way down—but I reminded myself I wasn’t going to let things get out of hand the way I had last time.
I did my best to fill my lungs. I wasn’t ready to get up yet. “Hello, Fiddlesticks. Nice to see you again. How are the wife and kids?”
He just stared at me.
“What’s with the sour expression? Seems to me if I hadn’t got Howlingfell killed, you wouldn’t have this nice white-collar job. Is it really worse than being back in Hell hacking pieces of petrified shit into smaller pieces, or whatever you used to do?”
“Why are you here?”
“Duh. To see your boss, as I already explained at the front desk. Of my own free will. No socking people in the breadbasket required.”
His head was certainly strange, almost normal in profile, but too narrow across the front, and about eighty percent of the proper size, although with the right haircut and clothing he could just pass for a normal human. He didn’t really have the right haircut, though. The small span of his face and the slightly outturned eyes made him look more like a horse or a fish than a person. Still, he at least knew how to tie a double Windsor knot. That’s kind of a dying art.
“Why shouldn’t I just beat you to a bloody, dead mess right here?” he asked.
“First, because it wouldn’t be as easy as you think it would. Second, because I’m an angel, so I wouldn’t be dead anyway, just waiting briefly for a new body so I could come back and gut you like a largemouth bass.” I should have stopped there. “Oh, sorry. Smallmouth bass, in your case.” I was lucky that he didn’t seem that sensitive about his appearance, but I’d almost sent the whole thing off the rails. “And third,” I said quickly, in case he just hadn’t figured it out yet, “because I have an offer for your boss that I know he’ll want to hear.”
He looked angry and bewildered—not a good combination on anyone, much worse on him. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“It’s not hard, Fiddle-me-this. I want to offer the Grand Duke something. He’ll want to know about it. So if you and I get to ripping pieces off each other, and he never finds out what it was until it’s too late . . . well, he’ll probably send you to Doctor Teddy.”
This hit home. Doctor Teddy was a hideous little thing that worked for Eligor in his house in Hell, inflicting inventive kinds of pain on the grand duke’s enemies. Fiddlescrape gave me a worried look and stood there for a moment, rubbing his huge hands together. I took the opportunity to lift myself slowly from the floor until I was standing. Whatever else happened, he wasn’t getting another free shot at me like the first one.
He growled at me to stay put, then stepped out of the room again. I heard the door lock with a very definitive click, then heard his steps moving away at the same time as I heard him speak to someone, presumably on a phone. I righted the chair I’d knocked over, sat in it, and calmed my breathing, trying to slow my heart. I can’t tell you how badly I’d wanted to put my foot up Fiddlescrape’s too-tall ass. It’s a lot harder being smart than it is being stupid.
A minute or two later he came back. He beckoned and led me out into the hall, then nudged me along it, past another half-dozen unmarked doors and into what looked like a freight elevator at the end of the corridor. We went up. The stories ticked over until we’d reached the forty-fourth, then the door opened.
“Office is at the end,” said Fiddlescrape.
“You’re not coming with me? What if I start to litter or unreel the fire hose or something?”
“Office is at the end,” he said, louder this time.
“Well, it
’s been fun,” I said as I stepped out. I’d been in this corridor before, knew the dark green carpets and expensive wainscoting. The entrance to Vald’s office was at the far end. The door of the elevator hissed shut behind me. Then the lights went out.
But I hadn’t been hit this time, or if I had, I hadn’t noticed it. I was still standing, though, could still feel my body, could still hear the elevator murmuring down toward the lower stories, but I couldn’t see a damn thing. Until the fire came. Whoosh! Flames all around me, blossoming from the walls, ceiling and floor like huge wavering flowers. It had to be gas jets—that was all I could figure, but I could already feel the fire licking at my clothes, shriveling my lashes and eyebrows to ash, so I jumped forward into the dark space before me.
Whoosh! More flames. What had at first seemed like a built-in crematory just outside the elevator on the executive floor expanded into a cascade of flames that stretched away in front of me, as if the oven had just become a long fiery tunnel. I couldn’t find the elevator now, let alone get back into it, and the skin on my hands and face was beginning to burn. Eligor, I had just enough time to think, you are such a shit.
Then I began to run, telling myself that it couldn’t last any longer than the twenty yards or so down the hall to Eligor’s office door. I could barely see the narrowing of the flames ahead of me, but I put my head down and did my best not to bump into any walls, or—God forbid—to fall down, because then I’d be roasted like a chicken dinner. The pain had already gone past the point I can describe. Fire had engulfed my clothes and was burning the skin right off my body. The only thing that had kept me alive this long was the fact that my body was from the heavenly warehouses. I could feel my eyes glazing, cracking, my lungs smoking as they shriveled into chipotle peppers. Every nerve in my body was giving its death cry, a shrill, continuous screech of pain that felt like it would kill me long before the actual damage did.
I ran for what must have been a hundred yards without finding anything but more fire. The burning corridor went on and on forever. Which meant I wasn’t in Five Page Mill anymore, or even in San Judas. Which meant I was in . . . no, not Hell. Not that fast. If Eligor could have managed it so quickly and easily the first time, I never would have survived to be here now. I wasn’t in Hell, I was stuck in my own mind.
