by Tad Williams
Still, for the first time since I heard the grand duke’s voice and knew he’d caught me, I felt something a bit like hope. Not much, but he’d offered me a deal. It might be just another trick, but the mere fact that he’d taken a break from flaying my skin and boiling my nerves like vermicelli suggested he wasn’t sure what to do with me. Paradoxically, my threat to let him torture me to death was keeping me alive, at least for the moment.
I wasn’t bluffing, either. I had realized, somewhere in the worst of it, that my situation was truly hopeless. Eligor was just too strong. I couldn’t escape him, I couldn’t fight. The only thing I could do, I realized in that cauldron of pain, was suffer. But I could keep on doing it if I had to. Yes, I would beg for mercy. Yes, I would tell him anything, say anything. But as long as I kept refusing to actually do what he wanted me to do, he could only subject me to more torture. He could torment and kill Caz in front of me, but he could do that to her whether I helped him or not. The only way I could do anything for her was by refusing to do what he wanted and forcing him to bargain.
So I hung, or floated, or lay there suspended in nothingness, forever or even longer, trying to build up my strength for when the hurting would start again. And I knew it would start, because I would have to prove to Eligor that I wasn’t bluffing. I would have to make him give up on pain.
It started again. I won’t bother to describe it. After a few millennia, even Eligor seemed to get bored and left me to the eager attention of something named Doctor Teddy, which looked like a plush bear toy but had the stunted fingers of a human child and the eyes and whisky breath of a terminal alcoholic.
Doctor Teddy made Niloch’s torturer look like the weekend amateur he’d been. Not only did he give me everything all over again, Doctor Teddy also had a few cute ideas of his own, but even my furry new friend seemed to run out of ideas after a while, and at last I was sent back to the gray place again, weeping and trying to remember my name, even though I knew that if I remembered that I would also remember why I was here and what was happening to me. They’d done something strange to me so I couldn’t sleep, and although I could tell time was passing by the slow easing of my suffering, there was nothing else to make the hours and days pass in that dreadful, empty, uncolored place.
When things finally changed, I was at first aware only that something was in the gray with me, and that whatever it was wasn’t quite in or out. The best way I can explain it is like being underwater, somewhere there’s more shadow than light and distance distorts things and plays tricks. For long moments what I was looking at was only a slantingly vertical shape, wildly distorted as though coming at me from a dimension I couldn’t entirely see, and then it stood over me, gray corpse face and pinhole eyes, that weird underslung jaw hanging open like a fish’s as it stared at me. The rest of it was gray, too, gray dead skin stretched over bone. Smyler hadn’t gotten any prettier since our last encounter.
I didn’t even care much anymore, to be honest, but I still flinched a little at the sight. “What do you want, Handsome?” I said when I found my voice. “Getting impatient? I’m sure you’ll get to play with me when your master’s done.”
Smyler leaned in so close I could see the lines on his skin clearly for the first time ever in the flat, medical light of the gray, and I realized that they were not just random wrinkles or even a tattoo but something much more intricate, much more strange. The murderer was covered in writing—trails of tiny letters laboriously cut into the skin with something very sharp, thousands of characters in some illegible text that covered every exposed inch of his skin. I looked down to the grayish hand pointing the four-bladed knife at my face and saw that the skin on his gnarled fingers was decorated too. His other hand was hidden behind his back, but I would have bet it was the same, covered in little scars as numerous as crawling ants.
“Why did you do . . . what was reason?” Smyler still ran his words together in the same slow but breathless way, monotonous as a bored priest reciting a too-familiar catechism. “Why you not run?”
“I don’t know what you mean. Look, if you’re going to stab me or something, just do it. It’ll give me something new to think about.”
“No.” He leaned even closer, until the leathery flesh of his face was almost touching mine, and I could see his eyes moving wetly in the deep holes. His voice was strained, even desperate. “Tell it. Tell it why.”
“Tell what?” I could smell the faint odor of his decay even in this gray nowhere, the musty, nauseating sweetness of something that had spent a long time dead and undiscovered.
“Tell it why you go back. Why you help little thing. Why no run, save you.”
It took me a while. In my defense, may I remind the jury about the thousands of hours of sadistic torment I’d undergone. Anyway, at last the astonishing truth dawned: this horrible creature wanted to know why I’d gone back to save Gob. He had watched the whole thing, it seemed, not just Riprash’s meeting but what happened afterward.
“Why did I go back? Because it was my fault the kid was there in the first place.” It had suddenly occurred to me that maybe Stabby McMurder-Mummy was now searching for Gob too, so I tried to make the kid seem less important. “I forced him to come with me in the first place. He didn’t want to leave Abaddon. I was just trying to help him . . .”
“No!” It was the first time I had ever heard anything like anger out of Smyler. Ordinarily he was as weirdly cheerful as one of those old grandpas who don’t speak any English that you see sitting in the back of Chinese grocery stores watching the news in Mandarin. “No,” he said a little more calmly. “You no help. Angel help. You devil. Keefs tell me. Devil in angel clothes.”
“Keefs . . . ?” It sounded weirdly familiar. Again, it took me longer than it should have. “Wait a minute—Kephas?” Sam’s mysterious benefactor. The angel who had made the deal with Eligor and used the golden feather as a marker. “You know Kephas?”
“Keefs . . . Kephas so beautiful. Beautiful like clouds and silver.” And suddenly the thing smiled, a full display of those ugly little bottom teeth as well as the few nubs in its upper gums. “Kephas tell it, do my words, and it will be an angel too.”
“What will be an angel? What is ‘it’?”
Smyler pointed the knife at his own chest. “It. It will be an angel if it do everything right. Kephas says it will.”
Oh my sweet God, I realized. He thinks he’ll get to be an angel by killing me.
“I am an angel,” I said, slowly and carefully. “I’m Doloriel, Advocate Angel of the Third House. Are you saying that Kephas told you I was . . . some kind of devil? It wasn’t Eligor who sent you after me?”
Smyler tipped his head to one side like a puzzled dog. For the first time I realized that he was as naked as I was, but whatever external features he’d once had, like genitalia, were gone, just more ruined, dead flesh. “Eligor?”
“The big old demon who owns this place. The one whose prisoner I am. You weren’t working for him, but for an angel?”
“It loves angels.” The corpse-puppet head bobbed up and down. “It will be angel when it’s done.”
I don’t like these “everything you know is wrong” moments when they happen to me in the course of absolutely ordinary life, but I like them even less when I’m a prisoner in Hell, taking a little break between bouts of indescribable punishment. What was going on here? This monstrous thing, this gibbering killer, didn’t belong to Eligor and maybe never had? Now that I thought about it, the grand duke’s reaction when I mentioned Smyler’s name had been a bit strange, a bit . . . noncommittal. But why would Kephas employ such a creature? Wasn’t Kephas hiding his or her identity from the rest of Heaven precisely because Kephas thought the Highest was too rough on the souls of the dead? How did that gibe with sending a serial murderer after a perfectly blameless angel? Who was the real villain here, Eligor, Grand Duke of Hell, or Kephas, supposed heavenly idealist? Neither of them? Both of them?
“How did you meet Kephas?” I as
ked.
Smyler stared hard at me, perhaps sensing some of the unhappiness behind my words. “Kephas came. Kephas spoke. Showed it Heaven. Showed it the light. Told it Papa Man and Mama were wrong. It wasn’t bad, it was made for . . . something else.”
“Papa Man? Mama?” Smyler had been alive once, so of course he must have had a family, or at least a mother, but it had been a long time since I had thought of him as anything other than a force of supernatural evil. “Were those your parents?”
“It was their cross to bear. Mama always said. It was borned because Papa Man had the sin of pride. Because he tried to make a baby at her when she was blessed by God to stay a version.”
“A . . . virgin?”
“Yes. Version. But Papa Man put the dirty in her. He made it inside her, and when it came out she saw it was ugly bad. That was what she said, what Mama said.” Smyler was getting worked up again, his voice getting monotonous and rushed as though the words were carried along on a river of feelings too fast and deep to be reached or even looked at closely. “Dirty thing, dirty thing, and Papa Man left it behind like dirt on the floor. Like mud on her dress. Can’t beat the dirty out of it, that’s what Mama said. Can’t make it die because God has reason for it. God wants it in the world, no matter how ugly bad. No matter how ugly bad and mean and wrong . . .”
I almost wish I’d never asked. It had been unpleasant enough just knowing it was out there and wanted to find me, this vile thing, this monster that had killed so many innocent people. Knowing how it had become such a monster was worse. Much worse.
It told me its story in bits and pieces, in strands that at first seemed to have no connection but later proved to be bits of a larger web. In some ways the tale was depressingly familiar, the dreadful story of so many sociopaths and religious psychopaths, a child treated like an animal or worse, the name of God used as the excuse for torture, an existence with no safe place, no kindness, no love. It was almost like Smyler’s vicious, dreadful parents had done their best to make something even more terrible than themselves, and they succeeded.
But every time he had killed, at least during his mortal life, Smyler had thought he was sending something beautiful to Heaven, a gift for the angels. Even the name he had given himself, the name he had left at the scene of so many brutal crimes, was not meant to evoke Chaucer’s “smyler with a knyfe,” but because when she had finished beating him, or puncturing him with sharp things, or burning his fingers or toes or face with a hot iron, Mama would always tell him, “Stop crying. You’d better smile. Remember, God loves you.”
And that was how he thought of himself, how he still thought of himself, no matter how deep the blood and madness. He was God’s smiling little soldier.
The story trailed off at last in confusion, because Smyler himself still didn’t know what to make of me. His tunnel-vision idea of the world, the same crazy focus that had set him to murder and driven him to follow me all the way to Hell, was not able to easily absorb new information, and the new idea that I wasn’t some kind of demon pretending to be an angel had left him baffled and uncertain of what to do next.
“It has to think. It has to pray. God will tell it what to do.” Smyler revealed the hand that he had kept hidden since he entered the gray space. It looked no different from the other, until first his fingertips began to glow, then the fingers themselves, then his palm too, until I could see his bones through the skin as though they were made of blazing phosphorus. His hand was so bright it was hard to look directly at it.
“What . . . ?” I blinked. If I could have raised my hands in front of my eyes I would have, but I was still helpless below the neck. “What are you doing?”
“Hand of Glory. Kephas gave it the Hand. To do God’s work.” Smyler swiped the glow at the gray nothing that surrounded us. The nothingness tore, leaving a ragged, smoldering edge and more nothingness beyond. Then Smyler climbed through the hole.
“Wait!” I cried. “Don’t go! Don’t leave me . . . !”
But it was no use. He was gone. The gleaming wound healed over in an instant and vanished. The gray was empty once more and I was alone.
thirty-five
hounds
WHEN THE gray finally dissolved, I found myself back in the conference room. There weren’t any donuts this time, just the moldy ruin of the box in the middle of the table where it might have sat for years. The coffeepot lay on its side, shrouded in cobwebs and covered with a thick film of dust. The table and carpet were filthy with dust, too. It was a bluff, I felt sure. Well, fairly sure.
Eligor had changed his outfit. Instead of his Count Richelieu drag, he’d opted for something a bit more like a male Victoria’s Secret model, if you can imagine such a thing: blue jeans, bare chest and bare feet, and beautiful, spreading white wings.
“I was an angel once, remember,” he said when he saw my expression. He was still wearing the Vald face. “And a bit higher up the ladder than you are.”
“Yeah, but I heard you got downsized.”
For a moment I saw a little of the white-hot anger beneath his achingly handsome, golden-haired disguise; a ripple through his entire being as though a stone had dropped into a pond. “I fell.”
He’s not hurting you at the moment, Bobby, I reminded myself. So why don’t you shut the fuck up and stop making him angry?
I stayed silent while he stared at me. He stared for a long time, as though I’d grown several new and interesting features since our last meeting. At last he extended his hand and an instant later Doctor Teddy was standing beside him, no taller than Eligor’s waist and cute as a wind-up abortion doll.
“I have a proposition for you, Doloriel,” said the grand duke.
“I’m listening.”
Eligor sat down in midair. “Here’s the problem, troublesome angel. You make me uneasy. Not because you’re as smart as you think you are, but rather the reverse. You’re so stupid that I don’t trust you at all.” He frowned as he considered. A lot of Renaissance painters, and not just the gay ones, would have burst into tears at the sight of such beauty. “You might think you’ve successfully hidden the feather from me and everyone else, but I can’t trust your idea of successful. Knowing that you’re all that stands between me and an infernalis curia makes me . . . well, if I was a delicate little thing like you, I’d say ‘nervous.’”
He wasn’t hurting me, but he wore a very strange expression, so I swallowed my natural tendency to crack wise at the dumbest possible time. “So?”
“So I’m going to offer you a bargain. I’m going to let you go back to Earth and get the feather. If you turn it over to me, you stay free. I have no reason to go after you once I’ve got it back, anyway.”
I couldn’t believe it. Could this really be happening, or was it just a trick? Eligor was actually bargaining?
I did my best to stay calm. “No. I take the Countess with me. If we both get back safe, I’ll give you the feather.”
He laughed. It was nearly a pleasant sound, which just goes to show you how powerful he really was. “You’re joking, of course. I could just erase you both right here and right now, then take a chance that wherever you’ve hidden the feather, it’ll stay there.”
“Then why don’t you?”
Again the long, considering look. It was only when he was doing such small, human things that I could really see how inhuman he was, because there wasn’t the faintest glimmer of emotion on that perfect face. It was like trying to stare down a marble Michelangelo. “All right, angel. My last offer. I will let you go. You will return to Earth and retrieve the feather. Then you will trade it to me for the Countess, if that is really what you want most from me.” A sly smile. “I would have chosen a better harvest of the riches of Hell if I were you, but we won’t belabor it. In return for the feather, I will give you the whore and promise you both immunity.”
“Don’t call her that.”
The smile widened. “Believe me, compared to what I could accurately call her, that is a compliment t
hat would make a maiden blush with pleasure. But never mind. That is my offer, my only offer. Give me your answer now.”
I was desperately trying to see the trick. I knew there had to be one. “How do I know you’ll keep your promise?”
“Little angel, the entirety of what you call reality only exists because of the promises of things like me. I cannot break my word any more than you could dismantle the sun or turn time backward. Also, you have no choice.”
“And if I get the feather and give it to you, you’ll let the Countess of Cold Hands go free? Casimira? You’ll release her and bring her to me and we’ll swap? Right? Then you’ll leave us alone? No revenge?”
“Exactly.”
“Say it. I want to hear you say it.”
He shook his golden head. “My, you are demanding for someone in your situation. Very well. I, Eligor the Horseman, master of Flesh Horse and Grand Duke of Hell, promise that if you return the angelic feather you’ve hidden to me, I will exchange this she-devil you call Casimira, Countess of Cold Hands for it.” He gestured lazily and suddenly Caz stood beside him, bound in chains and still gagged. Her eyes widened when she saw me, and she shook her head violently. I knew she was trying to tell me Eligor couldn’t be trusted.
Like I didn’t know that. But no matter how cool I was playing it, I also knew I had no other choice. “All right. I’ll make your deal. And then you’ll leave us both alone? Wherever we are? Forever?”