by Tad Williams
“Rewarded, rewarded. That has a nice sound.” The Block pushed himself back from his desk a little, which was when I noticed that he was tied to his chair with barbed wire; nothing remained below his ribs but a dangling length of nerves and backbone. Something like a large black slug clung to the end of the Block’s spine, and pulsed wetly as it sucked at it, like a French gourmet hungry for marrow. Every time it swelled I saw little ripples of pain cross the Block’s huge, raw face. It was nice to know he wasn’t having a lot of fun either. “Ah, but you see,” he said, “I have already been rewarded for my loyal service. I have been given the gift of memory, the gift of remembering all the other services I have performed, when I was alive and afterward.” The Block smiled again, although now I could see it was a grin of pain as the thing chewed and sucked at his spine. “What greater reward could I wish than the justice of the Highest and the opportunity to serve here?”
He was playing with me. I could feel it. Did he mean to let me go or keep me? Had he decided yet?
I let go of the doorframe, trying to look casual but mostly swaying. “Of course, great Block, you must have all you want. What could give you more pleasure than doing the Adversary’s sacred work here? Surely not even being transferred to a position of responsibility on a higher level could tempt a servant as loyal as you.” It sounds pretty sharp, but there were a lot of gasps and grunts mixed in as I struggled to stay upright. I was getting used to the insane pressure in my skull, but I sure hadn’t learned to enjoy it.
“Oh, it all sounds very important.” He gave me another one of those flat black grins as a wave of anguish rippled across his beet-red face. “Very important indeed. I’m sure you know important leaders.”
“Niloch, the Commissar of Gravejaw is a personal friend.” I hoped Niloch was too busy being a smoldering ash to ever tell this guy the truth. “And I don’t want to drop names . . . but there’s Eligor the Horseman. The grand duke, you must know him . . .?”
“Eligor?” His mouth tightened. “I am not fortunate enough to know His Grace, of course. But if he is a friend of yours . . .”
“Yes! Old friend. We’re like this.” I held up my hand, the two fingers side by side. “Just the other day he told me, ‘Snakestaff, when you’re back from this errand, you must come and stay with me.’” Which wasn’t altogether a lie—I was pretty certain Eligor would be very happy to put me up if he found out I was in town. It was just that the accommodations weren’t going to be even as nice as this place was.
“You have convinced me.” The Block’s face suddenly went darker, as though something was squeezing it in a huge invisible fist. When the spasm had passed, he said, “Come. Give me your hand.”
Almost twenty years of Earth life had made me a fool. I stuck out my right, just as if I was about to receive a congratulatory handshake and maybe even a small check. Bobby Dollar, Miss Fucking Congeniality. The Block’s thick, all too human hands closed around my wrist and yanked me forward. “There is a toll to pay, of course,” he said. Before I could get my balance he shoved my entire hand into his wide, black-toothed mouth, which felt worse than I can describe. Then he bit down.
I may not have been wearing my own body, and the demon body was obviously not remotely human, but I can tell you that it still hurt like an ungodly motherfucker to have my hand chewed off. Before I knew it I was down on my knees, whimpering and gasping as I tried desperately to stanch the blood pumping from the ragged end of my wrist. Block spit the hand back out. It lay for a moment on his desk like a bloated dead spider, then he lifted it and tore off three of the fingers, each making its own dreadful wet snap.
“Polly!” he shouted. The door opened. The bird-thing stood there.
“Yes, great Block?”
He tossed the fingers out to her as if he was throwing scraps to pets. I heard Bird and Porcupine and Baby Bear fighting over them, but I was in so much pain it seemed unreal. The Block raised the rest of the hand to his mouth and began tearing it apart and eating it in great, appreciative bites, the crimson muscles of his cheeks bulging as he smashed the bones between black molars. When he finished, he wiped most of the blood from his mouth and chin with the back of his meaty, hairy hand, then gave a small belch of appreciation.
“They will put you back on the lifter,” he said. “Remember that I could have taken more, Snakestaff of the Liars Sect. Tell your masters in the far heights that the Block could have sent nothing back but the head, and they still would have known everything they wished to know.” He gripped the edge of his chair with his two strong hands, lifting himself until the barbed wire stopped him. The slug-thing at the end of his ruined spine swung like the clapper of a church bell. I was too busy waiting to die from pain and nausea and fountaining blood to notice very much, but I heard him bellow, “This is my corner of Hell! I rule here! And if the great Black Master himself came to me, I would have my morsel of flesh from him as well. Yes, I would pick my teeth with his tail! Because I am Block the executioner! Block the butcher!”
He was still raving when Baby Bear grabbed me in his heavy claws and dragged me out.
I squeezed the torn end of my arm as tightly as I could while they dragged me back down those scream-echoing corridors, but I was losing blood very fast. I could feel my wrist bone digging into my good hand, but beyond that incredibly strange and painful sensation, I knew the rest of my body was slowly packing up its signaling apparatus and surrendering. As we reached the lifter even the wails of the tormented became muted, and the grotesque faces of Polly Parrot and her gang grew mercifully blurry. I felt a new pain, as though my stump was being sanded with broken glass: Baby Bear was licking the bloody wound. I slipped in and out of consciousness as we waited. It might have been a minute later, it might have been an hour, but the lifter finally arrived, groaning like an overloaded truck bumping down a steep hill. When the door opened, they kicked me a few times, then pitched me inside.
Already blood was pooling underneath me. The vibration of the lifter had almost shaken me senseless, and I seemed to be entering a long, black tunnel, crawling away from light and hope. I slapped my good hand against the wall, and as my other wrist started spurting again I tried to call out my destination. The words came in little wet blobs of sound, like bloody mucus: “The . . . Red . . . City.”
The lifter shook even harder, rattling me like a bug in a killing jar. Then the black tunnel of my thoughts collapsed around me.
twenty-one
terminus
“. . . FISTULA, POOR Meat, Heartbreak Soup, and Phlegethon Docks . . .”
I awoke to the sound of the lifter voice announcing the terrible places we were approaching and passing in quick succession. The pressure in my head was easing, although that was no longer the worst of my problems. As I struggled to make sense of things, the voice announced several more stops along the fiery River Phlegethon, during which time I managed to pull myself into a sitting position with my back against the lifter’s shuddering wall. My blood sloshing on the floor looked as though it might reach an inch deep if it ever puddled in one place. I felt like a smashed hourglass.
To my dull surprise, several more passengers had joined me while I was unconscious, an array of mixed sweets that altogether made for quite a diabolical little chocolate-box: beast-things, blob-things, and even a few almost humanoid shapes, mostly better dressed than what I had grown used to seeing. I couldn’t look at them long, since my eyes wouldn’t focus properly, but these more upper-crusty travelers seemed to have ranged themselves as far away from me along the lifter wall as possible. Under other circumstances I would have found it amusing, citizens of Hell fastidiously trying to avoid a little blood. Of course, not a single passenger offered to help me or even looked at me with anything deeper than casual distaste. As you might guess, Hell is not big on empathy.
When my head stopped spinning so damn fast, I tore a strip from my robe and clumsily tied it around the ragged stump of my wrist to slow the bleeding. If I had been in a human body, perhaps ev
en in one of my enhanced angelic bodies, I would have been long dead, but this demon form was sturdy, at least in terms of blood loss. With the pressure easing, I would actually have felt healthier than I had in hours if I hadn’t been so weak and dizzy.
Then again, I had to admit, maybe I’m just feeling better because I’ve almost bled out. Maybe this is what it feels like to die in Hell—the nicest thing that happens to you all day.
I didn’t really think I’d be allowed to die, of course. I would either be recycled into some permanent garbage heap of misery or, if I was deemed important enough, get swept up and shuttled off to the infernal body shops for replacement, which would be worse, since they’d probably notice when their meters all read, “ALERT! UNDERCOVER ANGEL! EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE!”
The lifter kept banging to a violent halt and then just as violently starting up again as people got on and off, more all the time as we rose higher—Phlegethon Heights, Lower Mandible, Brokebone, Shrill Hollows, and a raft of others I was too fuzzy to understand properly. When we started to get to the Lethe levels, starting with the Lower Lethe Basin, I pulled the makeshift bandage tight just a few inches below the wound, preparing to run, or at least crawl, toward safety when I got to my destination.
Upward we shot, through more Lethian stops, then on through a number of the lower suburbs of Pandaemonium. Memories implanted by Lameh told me the Red City itself was stacked many levels deep. The announced stops were all enticing—Ass Crack, Disgust, Filth Lake—but I finally heard the words I’d been waiting for, Styx Loch. See, the waterways of Hell all twine around each other like the strands of a DNA molecule, or at least that’s how I picture it in my head. And though the River Styx surrounded and also flowed through the bottom-most levels of Erebus and Tartarus (and for all I know might have lapped gently at the hooves of the Adversary himself down in the ultimate darkness) it also cradled the uppermost levels, and that meant we had almost reached Pandaemonium.
Even through the delirium and weakness, something struck me. An oddity. You’d have expected that if the Adversary and the most important work of the infernal regions were in the deepest pits, that’s where those courting power would have built their homes. Instead they were all up here, as far from those terrible depths as possible, as if Hell’s most important lords still somehow, at least dimly, hoped one day to climb back toward the light. Maybe Riprash had grasped something important.
The announcer voice went silent for long moments, then said in a flat, doom-laden tone, “Terminus.”
With a final seizure and a creak like a nail being dragged out of a hardwood coffin, the lifter ground to a halt. Doors hissed open in a puff of steam. The rest of the passengers, now somewhere close to two dozen, all tightly pressed together except in my bloody part of the car, shuffled out. I was terrified the door might close on me and the lifter drag me back down again, so I didn’t even try to rise but simply scrambled out on elbows and knees, doing my best to keep my bloody stump from touching anything. The shock was beginning to wear off and the pain was incredible, as if the raw end had been plunged into a bag of salt. Believe me, they may not let you die in Hell, but they’re quite happy to let you suffer to the extent of your capacities and beyond.
The Terminus was immense. You could have plugged a couple of Grand Central Stations into just the lifter station, but it was also the hub of a network of pedestrian tunnels, roads, and (as I discovered to my surprise) railways. The trains fanned out from the central terminus, and as I staggered up the stairs I could see some of them waiting on their tracks—long, low things like millipedes, dull black metal with windows so narrow they might have been gun slits and probably were. I had no time to marvel, though, because every second I was staggering lost in Pandaemonium was a second I was vulnerable to being grabbed by one of the roaming bands of thieves and kidnappers or picked up by the Purified, the elite Mastema guardians of Hell and the only creatures who owed allegiance to the Adversary above all his lesser supporters. Still, although the Purified might not dance to the music of Eligor and Prince Sitri and the other bigwigs, they would definitely agree that Bobby Dollar was persona non grata in Hell, and my express ride back to the Punishment Levels would have me under torture as quickly as if Grand Duke Eligor personally caught me in his bedroom.
The Purified were uniformed in semi-modern military gear the color of thunderheads, each one wearing a sort of black spiral on the tunic, like the view from on top of a tornado, perhaps an image of the metaphorical Pit we were all in. This somber gray and black motif was made cheerier by splatters of deep crimson, apparently individual to each soldier. In their bulky metal gear and the strange casque helmets that hid their faces, the Purified could have resembled a Victorian writer’s idea of astronauts but for their distorted bodies, which had only “big and strong” in common, along with the astounding variety of weapons they carried, including the first guns I’d seen in Hell.
One last dizzy thought as I stumbled across the main concourse through a crush of Red Citizens as thick as anything I’d found in Abaddon: So was this the level of technology in Pandaemonium? Why? Why did this place look like a fairly modern railway station while down in Abaddon even the comparatively well-off were living like medieval peasants?
Stuff like that tends to snag my interest, but I couldn’t get distracted. I was woozy, exhausted, and sick, and if I didn’t find the way out I’d attract notice from the armored Purified, who seemed to have little else to do but to stare out their eyeslits at everything and everyone that passed. I found a huge stairway that, in my condition, might as well have been Mt. Everest, but it seemed to lead up toward an area of greater light, or perhaps an even bigger concourse, so I tightened the rag around my wrist again and started up.
It took me what felt like half an hour or more to climb those hundreds of steps. I was pushed and bumped the whole way by flocks of grotesque commuters who shoved me whenever I got in their way, but at last I reached another lobby. It was smaller than the great concourse downstairs, but its monstrously tall and narrow windows glowed with bright red light, and I could see a door that looked open to the outside.
As the uncaring, often actively hostile crowd jostled me out of the terminus and into what I realized must be Dis Pater Square, I saw the heart of the great infernal city for the first time. Pandaemonium was built from what looked like only two kinds of stone, great blocks of volcanic black and something more translucent, almost like quartz, that glowed with a fiery scarlet light. The radiance from the great buildings in its center made the whole metropolis seem to burn like a coal. Add the surrounding black city walls and, from a distance, Pandaemonium looked like a pile of embers burning forever in the darkness. The Red City. It wasn’t that different from other Hell cities I’d seen, just bigger and more so. The sky above my head was a tangle: dozens upon dozens of skyscraper towers loomed crookedly against the darkness, linked to each other by an array of fragile bridges, as if someone had stuck a bunch of giant pickup sticks in the ground, point down, and then dumped another pile right on top to let them settle where they would. Just looking up at this helter-skelter made me lightheaded without taking away a single throb from my wounded arm.
Suddenly I realized I was no longer standing but lying on the ground in front of the Terminus. I had fallen but didn’t know when or how long I’d been sprawled there. I climbed back onto my feet and staggered forward again, but the exhausting climb from the lifter had almost ruined me. I had to find safety, but where? I dimly recalled Lameh mentioning a Red City safe house where Snakestaff could hide in an emergency, but my blood-starved brain couldn’t summon it up. If only Lameh were still in my demon-head like she’d been in my Bobby-head . . . but I’d left her behind along with my world, hope, and sanity.
Where should I go? I was a sick animal, and I needed to get to ground and lick my wounds, but there were more than a few problems to solve first.
Problem number one: I was in Hell. I had no money, and there was literally no such thing as a free r
ide here. Even if I could remember where the safe house was, I had no idea how far away it was, though it was likely to be outside the center of the city, and I was so weak I’d barely made it out of the station. I stared blearily at vehicles speeding past me along the narrow streets, the cars of the wealthy, exhaust-belching, low, and slick as snakes. I saw fancy coaches, some drawn by huge rhinolike creatures and others towed by strings of shrieking, beakless birds. I saw jitneys pedaled by near-skeletons and big cargo wagons pulled by headless slaves, but I didn’t see a single thing that was going to carry me without charge, and I was pretty certain that if I didn’t rest I wouldn’t last much longer without fainting again.
I spotted a food-peddler’s rickety wagon on the far side of the street, loaded with steaming vats. The owner had a jackal’s face and the legs of an anorexic spider, but he seemed the least likely candidate to turn me over to the Purified. All I could think of was climbing into his cart to hide and sleep while he was looking the other way. Everything was darkening in front of my eyes, and a very enticing heaviness was sweeping over me. Bleeding out, it’s called, and the idea of “out” was definitely there: I could feel myself diminishing, like something swirled away down a drain. I took a step into the road—no curbs in Hell—and found it was difficult but not impossible to walk. My vision had lost focus, but I could dimly see the shape of the wagon, so I took another step and another. Then something hit me.
I can’t really tell you much about what it was, or at least I couldn’t at the time, just something big and loud that was suddenly on top of me. Then I was rolling, or flying, spinning across one of the main streets of Pandaemonium, and it was black and white and red all over, just like in the old joke. Rolling, bumping, then another, smaller impact. A feeling like the entire stony sky of Hell had fallen on me, then blackness rushed in.