by Tad Williams
Saad licked his cracked lips with a tongue like a black garter snake. “I know. Cost you one handful to find out.” He gave me a harshly amused look. “You don’t think I tell you for free, do you? Hah! I don’t shit on someone for free.”
I still had quite a bit of Vera’s money, so the cost itself wasn’t an issue, but I didn’t want anyone around here to know I was comparatively wealthy, so I haggled and fought with Saad until he was waggling most of his arms in fury, and I got it down to four spit. Trust me, in Hell, fighting for every penny is just common sense, like hanging your food so the bears don’t come into your camp at night. Actually, it’s almost exactly like that, except bears are easier to negotiate with than whoever’s after your money in Hell.
My iron spits finally in Saad’s cash box, he directed me to a silk merchant named Han Fei out at the far end of the Night Market. I learned a few interesting things from that unpleasant gentleman, who imported the incredibly expensive silk from down on the Phlegethon levels. It was so expensive because it was actually made from the silk of real silkworms, or at least the kind of silkworms that could grow in Hell, apparently. I found out later that what they called “silkworms” in Hell was very much the same as what they called “slaves,” “prisoners,” and “the usual suspects”—the shiny threads were derived somehow from the torture of prisoners who had apparently been reborn in Hell as something that could be farmed for thread to keep the most wealthy of the hell-lords beautifully clothed.
I watched Han Fei eat a nine-course meal as he lectured me about infernal silk and the infernal economy. By the time he finished his dessert of honeyed eyes, I was exhausted. Most of the night was gone, and although I now had a list of a half-dozen or more places that traded in these most expensive fabrics, I knew it was too late to start working through them. I trudged back to the inn by the lagoon, to my small but still sweaty and uncomfortable bed, and did my best to sleep.
I guess it was irony, but for once I didn’t dream of Caz at all.
Within an hour of setting out the next day, soon after the first beacon had been lit, I eliminated half the places Han Fei had mentioned. They were all huge establishments, warehouses, really, dealing not just in silk but in exotic skins and all manner of other objects which would eventually wind up clothing the leading lights of Hell. It was pretty clear that if Caz had wanted to send me to one of these warehouses, she hadn’t given me enough information to take the next step. Like most places in Hell, the cloth merchants kept their records in their heads, and nobody was going to tell a stranger all the places they sold their fabrics, not even for a bribe.
I had a little more luck in one of the smaller shops, where a bedraggled old woman-thing with a face like a bunch of parsnips stapled together and fingers like dead twigs told me my sample was “the real thing,” the dye being something that nobody used anymore except for Chateau Machecoul, one of the most exclusive clothing stores in Pandaemonium. She told me this for free, which made me suspicious, but she also took a look at my clothes and declared I’d never be allowed in looking like such a gross peasant, which made me feel a little better. If someone isn’t saying something unpleasant to you in Hell, you should be checking to see if they’ve stuck a knife in your back.
I asked her to recommend a few things for me that might make a visit to Machecoul more successful. The prospect of extorting some money from me brightened her up considerably, and she spent the good part of an hour rigging me an outfit that wouldn’t have drawn attention in a community theater production of The Pirates of Penzance. She assured me that I looked like a leader of Pandaemoniac fashion, and as I examined my reflection in a polished sheet of metal I could almost agree. Yet another reason for me to get out of Hell as quickly as possible.
I knew better than just to walk up to a place like Chateau Machecoul. In Hell, going anywhere on your own little hooves is like announcing that you’re poor as dirt and eligible to be eaten by anything higher up the food chain, so I hired a cab, a sort of huffing steam crab on huge spiked wheels, and had it drop me off on the corner of Torquemada Street and Ranavalona Avenue in the Tumbrel District, a wealthy neighborhood where the mistresses and catamites of powerful demons did their shopping. I could believe that, since most of the demons and damned I saw there were either ridiculously beautiful in some very extreme ways, or deformed in some specifically sexual manner.
As I watched Hell’s beautiful people go past in ones, twos, and threes, I suddenly wondered whether Caz’s oh-so-attractive appearance wasn’t her own choice but rather something Eligor had insisted on. Certainly there was a fad among some of Hell’s highest to look very human. I’d seen it in Vera’s crowd, and I was seeing it even more clearly here, as Pandaemonium’s best and brightest window-shopped and held little tête-à-têtes at the equivalent of chic little restaurants. I say “equivalent” because, believe me, even a starving beggar on Earth wouldn’t want to eat the swill they served in those places. Doesn’t matter how rich you are, you can’t make anything taste good in Hell because nothing tastes good in Hell. It’s that simple. It may look like fine wine and nouvelle cuisine, but it tastes like vinegar and ashes. The only things that didn’t actively taste foul were the ever-present asphodel flowers, the food of the dead, and they were as bland as poi.
Chateau Machecoul looked no different from the outside than the small, expensive shops on either side of it, a jewelers and some kind of gentleman’s clothiers that seemed to specialize in sharp and pointy outfits that would have made any activity more intimate than waving across a room painful or actively dangerous. The ancient, mud brick buildings were decorated with awnings, window boxes, and swags of lights—electric, of course, because in Pandaemonium, electricity was a sign of wealth. I’m sure generating it involved some kind of hideous torture.
The door of the shop was locked. I rapped on it, and a moment later it swung open, but there was no one on the other side.
Fabric was everywhere inside the shop, hanging in huge sheets like a thousand overlapping tapestries and rolled in bolts in the wall alcoves, an almost claustrophobic array of different kinds of cloth. Headless dressmaker’s dummies—at least that’s what I hoped they were—stood all around me, but I didn’t see any customers, dressmakers, or salesdemons.
“Is anyone here?” I walked deeper into the store, my hand straying toward the pocket where I kept my Night Market knife. It was beginning to smell more like a trap by the second, like one of those Mafia things where the guy looks up from his cannelloni and realizes all the other customers have walked out. When a hand lightly touched me on my shoulder I turned around with the knife out, ready to cut the shit out of whoever had snuck up on me. Except, of course, I couldn’t. Because it was her.
She wasn’t as certain, of course—I didn’t look quite the same as the last time she’d seen me on Earth—but her eyes stayed on mine and she didn’t flinch. “Bobby . . . ?”
I could hardly speak. “Caz.”
“You idiot!” And then she hit me. Right across the chops. Knocked me spinning, too. Every time I saw that woman I wound up getting the crap punched out of me. Believe me, that’s not my idea of a perfect relationship.
“Ow! What the hell are you doing?” I said, pinching my nose shut to keep the blood off of my new clothes, but a moment later she was pressed against me and soon I was smearing my blood on both of us. Everything felt unreal. After so long . . . !
“Why are you always hitting me?” I murmured, my lips pressed so hard against hers that it probably sounded like Pig Latin.
“You shouldn’t have come! You shouldn’t!” She pulled her face back. Tears had started down her cheeks and frozen solid, little sparkling bits of white like irregular sequins. “You’ll get yourself killed, Bobby. You can’t do anything for me, so go home before he catches you.” But no matter what she might have been saying, she was holding on tightly. I already had her bodice open and had yanked it down so that I could reach her nipples, which stuck out like little pointing fingers. If I cou
ld have got both of them in my mouth at the same time I would have, but I had to take turns.
“No,” she moaned, but she was yanking up my shirt even as I suckled at her, grabbing the skin of my back as though she would somehow pull me into her, through her, like a doorway, and although she was still angry with me, still crying in frustration and fear, she never once pushed me away. Her hunger was as great as mine. As for me, seeing my strange, gray demon hands on her white skin suddenly made me feel as though I was staining her somehow, as though my foreign body was some kind of violation, an unfaithfulness, but Caz didn’t seem to care. After a few heartbeats I didn’t either. This was the body my soul was wearing, after all, and my soul didn’t care about anything except Casimira, Countess of Cold Hands. This was my real body now, and after the moment of strangeness had passed, it had never felt more that way.
We fell to the carpeted floor, scattering clothing, half-dressed as we wrestled, our only goal to obliterate ourselves in each other. For that moment, everything I’d been through, everything that still stood before me—treachery, torment, death—they all fell away. I didn’t even stop to consider that making love in one of Hell’s most famous boutiques wasn’t exactly discreet, because at that moment nothing existed but the two of us, separated for so long but never truly apart, still burning for each other. It doesn’t make sense in Hell or on Earth, but if you’ve been there, you know. We were making a cathedral of sweat and skin and stifled cries in the worst place that ever was, and nobody was in it but us.
We gave up on the clothes at some point, having removed enough of them that I could climb on top of her and sink myself to the root. My demon body, I was discovering, reacted pretty much like my earthly one. I guess the scientists are right: most of sex is in the mind.
Caz gasped and stiffened, her nails driving into my thickened hide like the tips of knives, ten stabs at once, but it only made me crazier, more animal. I rubbed my face against hers, taking in her smells in insane gulps even as she wrapped her thighs around me, urging me past the chilly bite of her petals to her deep inner heat. She groaned. So did I. We were pushing against each other so violently, striving for some impossible completeness of connection, that we kept bumping into things on the floor, legs of tables, dressmaker’s dummies, knocking things over until we must have looked a lot like those two damned souls in the Lykaion race, trying to destroy each other in the bloody sand of the Circus Commodus.
At last I paused, panting, dripping sweat and blood, still too exalted and too stupefied to come. Caz pushed me onto my back and then slid her body over me, pushing her pussy in my face as she licked me and smacked at me with her clawed fingers, then she climbed back onto my cock to ride me as though I were a dying horse, pulling everything out of me she could. When my orgasm finally burst out of me it felt like a heart attack. I shouted and pulled her against me as tightly as I could, and this seemed to squeeze her into climax as well. She clenched my ribs between her knees and rode harder and harder until her ragged breathing rose to a sustained growl of desperate and only coincidentally pleasurable release, then she rolled off me and lay like a dead thing. I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. I could barely breathe, but what air I could draw in smelled like Caz. She might be a woman who had been damned since before Columbus sailed, but she was the woman I had crossed Hell to find: to me, it was the true breath of Heaven.
At last her own panting slowed, calmed. She reached out a hand, nudged my arm with it. For a moment I didn’t know what to do, then I realized she wanted me to hold it.
We lay there, both of us still breathing very hard, hand in hand in a pile of Hell’s finest couture.
“Well,” she said at last. “We’re really fucked this time, Dollar. I hope you’re happy.”
“Strangely, yes,” I said. Of course we would both suffer terribly when we were caught. Dying would be the luckiest possible outcome, but neither of us were that lucky. “Yes, I am.”
thirty
a different universe
SHE GOT up. I hated that. I hated anything that wasn’t the two of us lying close and connected, preferably forever.
“Don’t.” I reached out a hand, barely touched the back of her cold thigh as she moved past me. “Stay with me.”
“I need to get out to some of the stores and look like I’m spending money, since I’m supposed to be shopping today, and I’m due back soon. And I need to let Poitou have his shop back. He only let me borrow it as a favor.” She smiled, but it wasn’t a nice one. “He thinks he’s doing it for Eligor, of course.”
The grand duke’s name was like a bucket full of cold water. I sat up. “Don’t. Don’t go back. That’s why I’m here, to take you away.”
“Let go of me, Bobby. This was already an incredibly stupid thing for me to do. You’ll just make things worse.”
“Worse? How could they be worse Caz? We’re in Hell! You live here, and I’ve spent better times in DMV offices—not counting what just happened, of course.”
She shook her head and kept gathering up her clothes. “Enough. My keepers are going to be after me any moment.”
“Keepers? You mean your former bodyguards, Crunchy and Yum-yum? I can take them. I can take them both.”
“Candy and Cinnamon. No, you can’t. Not here. Not in that body.” She was moving faster now, spinning out of my orbit, probably forever. “They’d tear your arms off like pulling the wings off a fly.” She nodded toward my partially regenerated hand. “Looks like you’re already having a hard time hanging onto body parts.”
I stood up. “Don’t, Caz. As long as I’ve known you, you’ve been telling me, ‘No, no, no! Don’t do it! Leave me alone! I don’t love you!’ But I’m not buying it. You just put yourself in terrible danger for me. You said it yourself, your big gray guidance counselors might come bashing through the door any second . . .”
“Not in here. They don’t know about this place. I’ve borrowed it before.”
“It doesn’t matter!” But a steam-jet of jealousy turned my insides scalding hot. Who had she brought here? I suppose I should have applauded her cuckolding Eligor any way and any time possible, but my feelings were a bit more complicated than that. “Just listen to me. I came here for you, and I’m not leaving without you.”
She was trying to ignore me but not doing a very good job. I wasn’t going to make it easier for her, so I got up and followed. When she sat down to pull on her shoes, I crouched beside her.
“I’m not going away, Caz. I’ve been missing you so badly for weeks—months! Can’t sleep, can’t do anything but think about you. I’m not leaving without you.”
“Months?” Her laugh was harsh, startled. “Do you know how long it’s been down here? More like years. Don’t tell me about missing someone. I was an idiot to let myself care. And now I’m paying for it. Just go away, Bobby. Let me heal.”
Years? Had it really been so long for her? “I can’t, Caz. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have let myself care, either—but I did. And now I can’t stop.”
She stared at me for a long, quiet moment, eyes narrowed so that her irises were only blood-red stripes. “You’re a fool. I’m a fool! It’s going to end badly,” she said at last.
“What doesn’t?”
Tears suddenly welled in her eyes and spilled over. They slowed as they ran down, freezing on her cold cheek. I reached out and touched one, watched it flutter to the floor, a lost snowflake in Hell.
“Where?”
“Where what?” But she wasn’t pulling away now. She held her bag and her wrap in front of her chest, as if they were all she had left to protect herself.
“Where do I see you again? When?” The sight of the pale, vulnerable skin on her neck made me so hot for her that I began to drag my own clothes back on in self-defense. I didn’t want to get her caught, no matter how powerful my need for her. I also wasn’t ready to take her away yet. I still had a few things to prepare, and I hadn’t expected to find her so quickly.
She was so beautiful I k
ept getting distracted from my clothes. I crawled toward her and ran my hands up the insides of her legs, lifting her skirt as I went, rolling it back until it lay in an untidy pile across her belly. I bit her gently on the flesh of her thigh, just above the femoral artery. She was cold and hot, both at the same time. She pushed my head in irritation as if I were an overly familiar dog, but she didn’t push very hard. I nibbled further up her leg until I could barely hear her because her thighs were pressing against my ears.
“Stop it! You’re like a teenage boy.” She made a little moaning noise of indecision, then finally shoved me away me more firmly. When she could manage it, she stood and shook down her skirt. “Tonight, at last lantern. Dis Pater Square, in front of the old temple. I’ll send someone for you.”
“Temple?”
“Just look. You’ll know when you see it.” She let me kiss her, sinking right into me for a moment, so that I almost thought she’d fainted. I think it was the first time I’d felt her without any of her armor, although it didn’t last long. I could sense her toughening up again in my arms. “I have to go,” she said, pulling away.
“You love me, don’t you?”
“I . . . care about you. I don’t love anything.” She shook her head. “That’s not my word.”
“It’s mine. It’s the same thing.”
“It’s an entirely different universe, Bobby,” she said. “Lock the door when you go.” Then she hurried out.
It took everything I had not to follow. Instead, I waited a decent length of time, tidied things up a little, then made my way out of Chateau Machecoul to the crowded streets. They looked different now, but it was hard to put my finger on why. More familiar, perhaps. The Halloween parade of hideous shapes and faces was never quite as bad in the expensive parts of the Red City, anyway, but it was still horrifying. If you dropped an ordinary human being into the midst of what I was seeing, they would have made a pants-wetting conversion on the spot to the most puritanical religious sect they could find. But to me, still floating on the high of having been with Caz, it looked endurable. It looked . . . ordinary. I really was beginning to get used to the place.