by Tad Williams
Eligor nodded. “Once I have the feather, I will leave you two alone forever, wherever you are, as long as you keep silent about what you know. But if you try to sell me out later in any way, our bargain ends, and I’ll do things to you that will make your time in the conference room seem like the games at a children’s party. Agreed?”
I took a breath, looked at Caz, who was still struggling. What choice did I have? “Okay. I agree. Now, take those chains off her, will you? If you hurt her, you’ll never get what you want from me. Never. I’ll just call Heaven and hand it over.”
A moment later Caz was gone. “She is free, but of course she is still in my . . . care. She’ll stay that way until I hear that you have the feather, and you’re ready to give it to me.”
I felt like Sky Masterson, putting my entire bankroll and my immortal soul on a single roll of the dice, but like I said, what other choice did I have? “Am I free to go, then?” I asked.
Eligor nodded slowly. “Almost. But if I were you, I wouldn’t hurry off until you’ve heard what else I have to say. You see, somehow my old friend Prince Sitri discovered that you were my guest. You remember Sitri, of course.”
I remembered the monstrous creature very well. “Oh, yeah. He’s a charmer.”
“He’s a jealous, interfering fat turd,” said Eligor with just a trace of rancor. “He’s informed the Senate that the prisoner I borrowed from Murderers Sect’s custody is, in fact, an angel—a heavenly spy.”
“What?”
“Because of that, a bit of . . . controversy has erupted. And because I have supposedly corrupted the guards of the Murderers Sect, Sitri and the others have sent the Mastema’s Purified to my house. They answer only to the Adversary, so bribery is not going to work this time.”
“Sent? You mean they’re on their way?”
The grand duke looked bored. “I would guess they’re probably already outside, being stalled by my household staff. But that won’t work for long.”
“So you had no choice. No wonder you made a deal with me! If you didn’t, they were going to take me anyway!”
Eligor shook his head. “No. I would never turn you over to the Senate alive. But if I give them your remains, there’s still the chance that someone will find that feather. I don’t want it . . . hanging over my head, if you see what I mean.” He fluttered his pure white wings. “Thus, our little bargain.”
“But how am I supposed to get out of Hell?”
“Not my concern. You found your way in, you can find your way back out, little angel.”
“But you said that if they catch me, they’ll make me tell them where the feather is, tell them what you did, everything . . . !”
“Ah.” He nodded. “Yes, there is one more arrangement to be made.” He pointed and the teddy bear monster was suddenly dressed in hospital scrubs. “Did you bring along our little friend, Doctor Teddy?”
“Of course, Master,” said the toy bear in his gruff little voice. He produced a sphere about the size of a golf ball from the pocket of his smock and held it out in a furry paw. The thing was partially transparent, like a cloudy bubble, and I could see something sliding wetly inside it, something with very little room to move.
Eligor took it from him and held it out for me to see. It had too many teeth and too many scrabbling legs, and its eyes watched me through the filmy sphere as if it were already thinking about drilling into me and laying eggs or something. “Do you recognize it, Doloriel? You’ve seen more than a few.”
I leaned away from the hideous thing. “What are you talking about?”
“It’s an intracubus, our version of one of your guardian angels. These are assigned to every human born, to keep track of all the things they do that will eventually bring them to us here. On Earth, intracubi are insubstantial, but here they’re quite real, quite . . . physical. In fact, to implant this one, Doctor Teddy’s going to have to do a little surgery on you.”
“Surgery . . . ?”
Eligor smiled and gestured. The hotel conference room disappeared, instantly replaced by the chamber with the rusted, stained table and cutting tools. A moment later, without anyone touching me, I found myself facedown on the table and unable to move. I felt little Torture Me Elmo climb up onto my back, then move forward until he straddled my neck. Worst of all, I could feel that he had a little furry erection.
“It has to go in at the base of the skull,” the grand duke said. “That way, if you talk to anyone in Hell, I’ll know about it, and if the Mastema catches you—well, our little intracubus will just eat his way out and we won’t have to worry about your saying something you shouldn’t.” He chuckled. “But if you do somehow make your way out of Hell and back to Earth, Mister Dollar, the intracubus will disappear with the demon-body you’re wearing now. And I’ll be waiting to hear from you. You know my office number. Call me when you have the feather, and we’ll arrange our little swap.”
Then Eligor was gone. I could feel his absence like a flame suddenly extinguished. It was just me, the thing in the sphere, and the furry monstrosity who promptly began to gouge a hole in the back of my head with what felt like a rusty screwdriver. Anaesthetic? In Hell?
I had really hoped I was done screaming for the day.
You would have thought that after all the terrible things that had happened to me lately, after all the attacks, torments, violations I’d suffered, this would have been just the latest and the least, a small price to pay for escaping alive or, at least, being given the chance to escape. You’d have thought that, but you’d have been wrong. The hideous sensation of having my skull gouged open paled into absolute insignificance next to the thing that Doctor Teddy pushed into me until it nestled against the meat of my brain. It felt like a hermit crab made of razor blades forced into far, far too small a shell—a shell that just happened to be attached to my neck. Then those legs and teeth closed on my nerve stem, anchoring the thing, and worse by far than the pain was the feeling of its connecting itself to me in a thousand horribly intimate ways. I’ve talked with spirits and demons and guardian angels, and I’ve met things that would make a Green Beret wet himself and never even notice, but I swear I’ve never felt anything as disgusting as having that thing get comfortable inside my head.
When the toy doctor was finished with the skull-rape, he took a few brisk moments to close me back up, sewing the wound with what felt like baling wire, then Doctor Teddy and the conference room suddenly swirled and evaporated, as though a drain had opened up and let it all flow away.
I found myself standing outside on the grounds of Flesh Horse, hidden in an ocean of shadow. The great tower loomed so that it blocked even the light from the highest beacons. Still, enough light filtered down to the great house’s main entrance to let me see the host assembled at Eligor’s gate. Any one of the huge, fierce, mounted Purifier soldiers could probably have crushed me by himself, and there were dozens of them, armed to the teeth with strange guns, long spears, and axes with oversized, jagged blades. Their horses were carcasses, skin tattered to reveal yellow bones and drying organs. But what really made me uneasy were the tracking beasts that slavered and pulled impatiently at their harnesses. They were smaller than the horses, although not by much, but so strong and so eager to be after their prey (me, remember?) that several times they yanked bulky handlers off their feet and had to be dragged back by many hands pulling together, as though they were drifting four-legged zeppelins.
In the middle of one such struggle, one of the animals lifted its malformed head and howled, a noise that turned my bones to water. The others chimed in, until the grounds beneath Flesh Horse rang with their chilling cries. I’d heard of hellhounds, but this was the first time I’d ever seen them in their native element, and suddenly I felt more sorry for Robert Johnson than I ever had. As I stood there, my heart beating so hard I could barely stand, I heard the old bluesman’s mournful, doomed voice singing for me and me alone.
And the days keeps on worryin’ me
There’s a
hellhound on my trail
As if sensing the hopelessness of my thoughts, the intracubus tugged at the strings of my mind like an impatient driver racing the accelerator, making everything that was in me turn cold. I reached up and touched the back of my head where the unspeakably nasty thing had been inserted. Doctor Teddy’s stitches felt big as shoelaces, crudely knotted, and the incision was still oozing. A little bit of Eligor was going with me, whether I liked it or not.
Bad as it all was, I didn’t really have any options left. It was time for me to run for my life and my eternal soul.
thirty-six
the deeps
HELL’S DARK hours were coming on, which helped a little. I was naked and bruised, bleeding in a few places, but most of the horrible things that Eligor had done to me hadn’t left marks. Nakedness was less common in Pandaemonium than in other parts of the inferno, but it certainly wasn’t unheard of.
As I scuttled through the shadowed places, across cinders and broken stone, I prayed that Riprash hadn’t already sailed back to Cocytus Landing. For all I knew, I could have been Eligor’s prisoner for months or even years, and although I doubted that, some time had definitely passed: the hand that Block had bitten off was now mostly regrown. The gray skin was too smooth, and puckered like burn scars, but the fingers all worked, and I could touch them with the thumb, which meant I could hold things in it. Weapons, was what I was thinking about, of course. Angel bodies are ambidextrous and, apparently, so are demon bodies; I hadn’t suffered too badly by being one-handed, but when it comes to fighting, two hands are definitely better than one.
Even as I made my way down through the outskirts of Sulfur Lagoon, not too far from where I had been entertained so interestingly by Vera, I heard the alarm being raised around the city, the shriek of sirens and the howl of my animal pursuers, the last thankfully still distant. That was little old me everyone was being warned about. Luckily, most of Pandaemonium’s citizens would be locking themselves behind doors, since nobody would want to come into contact with the hellhounds, which weren’t always real selective about what they caught and ate. “I didn’t do anything!” is not an excuse that went very far with either the hounds or their masters. A massive sign hung above the Via Dolorosa at the entrance to the city, where most municipalities had things like “Welcome to Sheboygan!” Pandaemonium’s said “Nobody’s Innocent” in ten-foot flaming red letters.
I was in such a hurry to get to Riprash that I was careless entering the Stygian docks and was stopped by a guard. I had to beat the creature senseless, and when I dragged him into the light I saw he was just a ragged old thing, batlike and frail. I didn’t know if he’d raised some kind of silent alarm, though, so I couldn’t waste a lot of time feeling sorry for him. I shoved him into a dark corner behind a huge coil of rope. I still didn’t know what to think about average folks in Hell. Some of them had probably done such horrible things that if I knew the truth I’d want to burn them to ashes on the spot. Others might have been driven to their crimes by circumstance, like Caz, or might have done so many comparatively good things since their crimes, like Riprash, that it seemed petty to keep punishing them. On the other hand, this was Hell—how much sympathy could I afford to waste on its common folk, especially when nearly all of them would be delighted to see me captured and tortured again?
I made my way to Kraken Dock without running into any more port employees. To my immense joy, I could see The Nagging Bitch bobbing in its slip. I had a bit of a disagreement with the sailor guarding the gangplank, a scaly fellow with webbed fingers and toes, well-designed for a mariner’s life. But I kept my temper, nobody got stabbed, and eventually Riprash himself appeared. When he saw it was me, the ogre hustled me aboard and into his cabin. Gob was sleeping in a corner, curled on a pile of hides like a pet.
Riprash insisted on doctoring me on the spot, dousing my wounds in stinging brine and then covering them with hot tar, a cure that seemed worse than the injuries. Still, I was profoundly grateful just to be in a situation where someone would even think of trying to give me some comfort.
Gob woke up during the doctoring and watched the process with interest. One or two of Riprash’s crew wandered by as well to see who was, as one put it, “Yawping like a pig with the wrong side of its neck cut.”
I warned Riprash that I was currently Hell’s Most Wanted, so he ordered his men to pull up the gangplank and prepare to leave port.
“Might get the Harbor Guard when we reach the outer breakwater,” my favorite ogre told me. “Don’t want a fight, but if we get one, you’ll need something.” He frowned at me. “Wouldn’t hurt to put some clothes on you, too. Styx gets colder as we get out in the center of the channel.”
I was nearly dead on my feet, but I did my best to remain upright while Riprash dug through what he had. None of his own clothes would fit, of course—I might as well have tried to wear an old Sears family camping tent—but he found a few of his boss Gagsnatch’s things in a sea chest. The shirts all had two neck-holes, of course, to go with Gagsnatch’s redundancy in the head department, but with a flick of his dirty fingernail Riprash turned two holes into one large one, and the pants, though baggy, were a better fit than anything of Riprash’s would have been.
None of this helped with the ache in my skull from Doctor Teddy’s brutal surgery, or the knowledge that some kind of crab monster was crouched at the end of my brainstem, ready to execute me, but I couldn’t afford to be picky. I was out of Eligor’s clutches except for that, and it beat the shit out of being flame-broiled, I can tell you.
“Now, weapons,” Riprash rumbled. “Hmmm. Stab-stab or boom-boom? Maybe both.” He lifted out another, much heavier chest like it was a shoebox, and after rattling his way through a pile of his own weapons he pulled out a knife that looked like a slim lady’s dirk in his massive hands but which would serve me well as a sword. I slid it through my belt, feeling like a Halloween pirate, but Riprash wasn’t done yet. At the bottom of the chest he found what he’d been looking for, a brace of pistols wrapped in waterproof canvas. Not the flintlocks I had seen several times in Hell, but something a bit more modern, closer to the cap-and-ball Colt revolvers that had solved the most crucial disagreements of the American West. They were made of rough, black iron, and the grips and other trim were yellowed bone, minutely carved.
“Fellow traded those to me for passage. More or less.” Riprash laughed.
I had been helpless and tormented a long time, so I liked the idea being able to shoot at things that wanted to hurt me. I slipped the guns into my belt on either side, butts forward, then took turns drawing them cross-handed, individually and together, Billy the Kid style. My regenerating hand ached after only a few tries, but the guns were well-balanced. I planned to fire them later on to see how accurately they were sighted.
“You said, ‘more or less’?” I asked as I practiced.
“He stowed away in Foul Bitters. Wanted to get to Pandaemonium. I told him I’d take the pistols as payment. He said no and pulled one of them on me.” Riprash shook his huge head, the wet wound in his skull looking as fresh as if it had just happened. “So I threw him overboard in the Hungry Rock Straits and kept his guns. But I can’t even get a finger into the trigger guard, so you might as well use ’em.”
“I guess the original owner won’t mind.”
“When we go through the Straits you can ask him.” Riprash laughed. “But you’ll have to shout. I hung an anchor on his belt, so he’s probably still on the bottom.”
When Riprash left to see to his duties, I stretched out on the floor of the cabin. Gob watched me silently as I pillowed my head on a set of oilskins.
I fell asleep almost immediately, a deep unconsciousness that would have been dreamless but for the nagging sensation that I was sharing my skull with something far more unpleasant than just my own brain. Which, of course, I was.
I woke to a quiet ship, at least by hellish standards, and for a little while I just lay on the floor of Riprash’s cabin and
enjoyed the sensation of not being actively tortured. I probably should have been up on deck keeping watch for dogpaddling hellhounds, but it was my first chance to think without agonizing pain in a long time, and I had a lot to think about, especially the possibility that Smyler hadn’t been working for Eligor after all, but for Kephas—an angel, Sam’s benefactor, and the other half of the grand duke’s little agreement. It made sense in a way, since Heaven had been the last party in possession of Smyler (or at least his ashes) after we captured him and the Bagmen finished with him. But why would Kephas send a psychotic murder machine after St. Jude’s favorite angel, namely me? I knew Heaven’s politics were less squeaky clean than they looked, but that still seemed a bit extreme.
I puzzled over it for a long time, but I was clearly missing some pieces, not least of which was: Who the hell was Kephas? And how did trying to get me stuck with nasty, pointy things gibe with that mysterious angel’s supposed improving-the-lot-of-human-souls agenda?
Frustrated, I heaved myself up and stumbled out to the deck. The Nagging Bitch was in the deep center of the river, and Pandaemonium had shrunk to a distant glow behind us. The Styx was almost beautiful, black and shiny, the waves sprinkled with coppery reflections from the far-off afterlights, the waters undisturbed but for the occasional rolling, cylindrical length of some terrifying river serpent breaching the surface. We had the current and seemed to be making good speed. New mysteries aside, I felt almost hopeful for the first time in longer than I could remember. All I had to do was make it out of Hell and recover the feather, then Eligor would exchange Caz for it. After that—well, if there ever was an “after that,” I’d worry about it then. How I was going to get on with dating a known demoness was a problem of success. I’d deal with it when I had to.