by Tad Williams
He looked at me like I’d asked an earthly teenager if the Macarena was still hip.
“No? Then find me someone who can. Walter, help me find some of these oilskins that are the right size.”
“What are you doing?” Walter asked as Gob sped off across the snapping, fishy chaos of the deck.
“They don’t want the rest of you, they want me. As long as I’m on this ship, they’re going to keep coming. But if I’m off it, well, I think they’ll follow me instead.”
He looked at the pile of skins collecting beside me. “What? Are you going to make a life raft? They’d catch up with you in an hour.”
“No, I’m not going to make a life raft. I’m going to try a little trick. I don’t know how much you remember yet about your old life, but on Earth they used to be impressed by someone walking on water.”
He stared at me in puzzlement. “You’re going to walk on water?”
“Better than that. I’m going to walk under the water.”
A few moments later Gob returned with what looked like one of the oldest members of the crew, a sailor named Ballcramp whose hell-body seemed to be formed from the least attractive elements of the concepts spider and beef jerky. The worthy fellow clearly thought I was insane when I told him what I wanted, but saw the benefits of working in the captain’s cabin, out of the murderous rain of fish. He arranged himself on the floor and took out a sewing kit wrapped in hide, with needles made of bone and thread made of gut.
I explained what I wanted and left him stitching oilcloths together under the supervision of Walter and Gob while I hurried across the deck with my arms over my head against the continuing flurries of animated fish bones. Riprash was down on the gun deck, trying to get the two workable cannons into firing position nearer the stern.
I told him my plan. Being a demon, Riprash didn’t waste any time arguing with me, even though it wasn’t very likely I’d survive. It was occasionally almost refreshing how few social niceties there were in Hell, how little time was spent pretending to care about things that nobody really cared about. Riprash had nothing against me, but he loved the Bitch, and he probably also thought that I’d just be recycled somehow if my body died. I didn’t bother to explain that dying would just be the fastest possible way to deliver myself into the hands of Niloch and the rest of Hell’s demon lords. Lameh’s instructions had made it very clear: Temuel’s arrangements could only get me back into my old body once he’d managed to extract me, and he could only extract me from one particular place, the far side of Nero’s forgotten bridge.
“So if it works, Niloch and his men should leave you alone,” I finished. “Can’t promise, but if they have to choose, I think they’ll choose me.”
“You’ll never make it,” Riprash said. “There are necks and black sinkers and a shit-swarm of big fang jellies in this part of the river. Any one of ’em will swallow you like a pickled eyeball.”
I didn’t even want to be swallowed like a regular eyeball. “Can you get me closer to the shore?”
“Not here. Can’t lose the current or they’ll be on us. But in a little while we’ll be past Bashskull Point where the Styx meets up with the Phlegethon at the edge of the Bay of Tophet. Water’s shallower, won’t be any fang jellies. Might be some hogsquid, but they’re not as bad. You know about them, right?”
To be honest, I didn’t really want to know about hogsquid or fang jellies or any of them. Everything already sucked so completely that some new bad information would have just pushed my situation past its current state of Zen-like perfect fuckery into something messy and overdone.
The Headless Widow was gaining on us, and when they fired their guns the white waterspouts of falling shells were now only a few hundred yards behind us. I stopped on the way back to Riprash’s cabin and picked up a cannonball of my own to carry off, adding the gunnery sergeant to the list of Hell-denizens who thought I was crazy.
I thumped the heavy iron ball down in a corner of the cabin and did my best to make it secure against the pitch of the ship; it was big enough to break bones if it started rolling. Then I went back to directing old Ballcramp. “Leave a hole here, at the corner,” I told the spindly creature.
He shook his shriveled head at this senseless order, but the undead flying fish were cracking against the outside of the cabin, and it was a lot nicer inside, so he said nothing.
“You’re both safer with Riprash,” I told Walter and little Gob as I strapped myself into the crude oilskin vest I’d had Ballcramp make. Puffed up with the air I’d just blown into it, it made me look a bit like the Michelin Man, but less svelte. A fair wind, one of the few bits of luck I’d had in this whole cursed trip, had kept us ahead of Niloch long enough to reach Bashskull Point, and I was determined to get off the Bitch before the commissar destroyed it.
“But they know this ship,” Walter said. “They know Gagsnatch’s stall, everything. We’ll never be able to go back to Cocytus Landing now!”
“Don’t matter,” said Riprash as he lifted me into the dinghy. “We’re not going back.”
“What do you mean?” As we talked I hurriedly tested the oilcloth of the vest to see if it was flexible enough, but my main concern was that the seams would give under the pressure: I didn’t have a huge amount of faith in the tar we’d used to seal them.
“It’s a sign, that’s all,” said Riprash. “Like I told you, I’ve been thinking on this, and I see it clear now. I’m to take Nagging Bitch and spread the Lifters’ word. We’ll go where we please, and every port will be our home.”
This sounded like a spectacularly bad idea. “The authorities, Eligor and Niloch and Prince Sitri and the rest—they’ll stamp on you like ants, Riprash. They’ll never let you get away with it.”
“Even the Mastema can’t be everywhere,” he said, surprisingly cheerful. “We’ll stop and spread the word, then move on. We’ll leave behind those as can keep spreading the word for us. Gob here can say the Lifters’ Prayer by heart already! Say it boy. Show him.”
The kid looked embarrassed (or fearful, it was hard to tell with Gob) but he stared at the deck and spoke in a quiet, very serious voice.
“Out farther, way up in Heaven,
Hell has took my name
The kind don’t come
The will won’t come
In Hell as it does in Heaven.
Give us this day our asphodel
And give us our best passes
As we give up on those who passes against us,
And lead us not into time’s tortures
But deliver us from our evil . . .”
Again, the lack of tear ducts kept me from making a blubbering fool out of myself. I still wasn’t sure whether I’d helped the boy or doomed him by bringing him up out of Abaddon, but it was too late to change anything now. “Keep safe, Gob. Riprash will take good care of you.”
The boy nodded. I don’t know whether he would have thanked me in any case, but people didn’t do much thanking in Hell, as you may have noticed, and we were also surrounded by gouts of white water as Niloch’s guns began to find our range, so things were a bit hectic.
“And Walter, I’ll get you out of here. Somehow.” I felt like an idiot even as I said it—so many promises, so few fulfilled. But Walter was too polite, even as a demon, to tell me how unlikely that was. Instead he just waved like a kid watching his older brother going to the gallows.
Riprash began lowering the dinghy into the water, manning the ropes all by himself. “I put a flask of rum in that vest of yours, Snakestaff. You’ll need it, I think. And tell you-know-who back in you-know-where that I’ll spread the word all over the Inferno!” he bellowed.
Was that really what Temuel wanted? It didn’t matter, because that was what he was going to get. We never know what a gesture or a word will lead to, do we?
“God loves you!” I called. It was what we angels say to the recently deceased. I was pretty sure none of these folks had heard it since then, and some of them like Riprash had pr
obably never heard it at all.
“Bobby!” Walter leaned over the rail, and would have fallen when a cannonball landed close enough to rock the ship, but Gob caught at his legs and kept him from tumbling. “I just thought of something. The voice! I remember the voice!”
“What voice?” I could barely hear him over the wind and the barking of the Headless Widow’s guns.
“The voice that asked me about you.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
“I’m not sure either, but I think it’s important. It was a child’s voice. A sweet, child’s voice . . . !”
My boat splashed hard into the water, and for the next moments I was busy trying not to fall into the river. The waves beaten up by the wind had seemed much smaller from on board the Bitch than in the little dinghy. I could hear Riprash bellowing for the rowers to start pulling, and the slave ship began to move away from me. I think the sight of my boat being put into the water had confused Niloch and his crew. The Widow’s guns fell silent, though the black bulk of the ship continued to bear down on me.
I’m sure the commissar and his crew expected me to start rowing, but in fact I hadn’t bothered to bring any oars—no point to it, as you’ll see. I watched Nagging Bitch pull away, and for the first time I felt how truly alone I was.
Niloch and his crew obviously suspected some kind of bomb or other trap, so when they were thirty or forty yards away from me they disengaged their engines and let the ship drift with the same current pushing my little boat. Many sailors and soldiers looked down through the clouds of steam that drifted from the Widow’s smokestacks.
Seen this close, Niloch looked even less pleasant than I remembered. A lot of his bone tendrils had simply burned away or broken off, and for the first time I could see that his skeletal head was more like a bird’s than a horse’s.
“You!” he screeched, “Snakestaff, you miserable turdling! Why do you look so puffed up? Whatever armor you’re wearing under that won’t save you from me. You destroyed my home.”
“Gosh,” I called back, “maybe because you were going to torture me and then turn me over to your superiors?”
“Nobody may flout authority,” Niloch screeched. “Least of all a speck of dirt like you, a creature with no level, no land, no loyalty . . . !”
“Honestly, I’m not listening,” I said. “You’re as boring as you are ugly.” I looked around to make sure that Nagging Bitch was still on the move, that Riprash and the rest were putting distance between themselves and Niloch’s larger ship. Then I bent down and picked up the heavy iron sphere from the bottom of the dinghy.
“Do you know what this is?” I asked.
Niloch tittered in surprise. “A cannonball.”
“Wrong. Try again.”
He scowled, a strange thing to see on such a long, bony face. “A bomb? Go ahead, little traitor. Destroy yourself—you won’t hurt us. This ship is iron-plated.”
“It’s not a bomb, either. It’s just a weight.” I balanced for a moment with my foot on the boat’s rail, just until I could tuck the heavy iron ball into the harness I wore across my belly, then I stepped off the boat and the cannonball yanked me down into the oily, caustic waters of the Phlegethon.
thirty-eight
chained
I’M SURE I would have had to pay extra on any package tour of Hell for the thrill of sinking to the bottom of the Phlegethon River—“swim with the friendly fang jellies!”—but to be honest, I was more intent on surviving than getting the most out of the experience. Actually, surviving probably was getting the most out of the experience.
I spent the first few seconds pulling the bone cork out of the air sack on my vest, then getting the opening into my mouth so I could breathe. Shallowly, of course: the air inside had to last until I could reach land, which also meant I had to outlast any pursuit from the Widow. I looked up. The eyes of my demon-body were very adaptable to low light and, luckily, the Phlegethon wasn’t as dark as the Styx. Even so I could barely make out the hull of Niloch’s ship far above me, in a circle of sky. I could see all right, but the Phlegethon wasn’t always bursting into flame by accident: its waters made my eyes sting and irritated my nose something fierce. Still, so far so good. The cannonball was heavy enough to keep me on the bottom despite the buoyancy of the oilskin air sack.
Things swam past me in the murk, some of them quite depressingly solid, serpentine forms like huge eels or something fished out of Loch Ness, but others that were scarcely more than dark streaks in the water or cold currents with a definable shape. I didn’t see any of Riprash’s fang jellies close up, but I saw something large in the dark distance that looked like a floating circus tent trying to fold and unfold itself as it floated along. I didn’t waste much time thinking about it or any of the others, because it seemed obvious to me that the bottom of a river in Hell wasn’t likely to be a safe place. The only thing I could do to improve my odds was get to land as soon as possible.
As elsewhere in Hell, the animal life was as distorted and depressing as the more complex creatures. As I reached the bottom and began to trudge slowly across the mud in what I believed was the general direction of shore (and if I was wrong I was going to be in serious trouble) I found myself stepping carefully around spiny things that could have been sea urchins if they hadn’t been in a river and five feet wide. Flat, disklike crabs with disturbingly human faces skittered in and out of the rocks on the bottom, sending up little puffs of silt as they dodged away from predators that were little more than toothy jaws with fins. Once I stopped, despite my limited amount of air, and waited while a vast shadow passed right over me with a slow flick of its tail. I couldn’t see it clearly, but it was covered in bony plates and had a mouth big enough to swallow Bobby Dollar and a few other folk at the same time. I had no illusions that I’d be able to outswim or outfight it—the thing was the size of a school bus—so I just hunkered down. It was a long wait, but at last the living submarine moved on, and I could continue. Later I think I even saw a hogsquid, which truly did look a bit like a my friend Fatback in his pig form, if Fatback was as big as the payload of a tanker truck and had twenty-foot tentacles growing out of his mouth. Fortunately for me, the ugly bastard was too busy rooting up and swallowing doomed creatures from the murky river bottom to notice me.
It was hard to hold myself to small breaths, hard to walk slowly when there were monsters all around, and I could feel the air sack getting smaller and smaller, but I had no idea how long it would take me to reach the shore or whether it would even be safe, at that point, to get out of the water. I was pretty certain Niloch would be watching for me to surface. He might even be waiting when I reached the riverbank, since it didn’t take a whole lot of smarts, even by the standards of infernal nobility, to realize what I was trying to do.
I had just kicked away a few larger specimens of the crabs with faces—the bigger ones looked both less human and more expressive, if you can imagine that—and was really beginning to wonder whether I had enough air to make the shore, when I saw another large, long shape coming out of the murk in my general direction. Certain it was another one of the plated monsters or something even worse, I crouched down in the mud and froze in place, trying not to let the bubble of air in my lungs escape and give me away. But what came toward me out of the clouds of silt, heading out toward the deepest part of the river, was not the prehistoric monster I expected, but . . . a parade. Humanoid shapes walked along the river bottom in a line, kicking up the gray ooze so that they seemed to be moving in a fog, like a vision of fairies in the Irish hills. Then I saw that they were walking along the bottom because they were chained together.
Slaves. Somebody’s slave ship had been chased by a faster ship, or perhaps merely sunk. Whichever it had been, these poor damned souls had wound up at the bottom of the Phlegethon, too heavy because of their chains to reach the surface. I could only guess how long they had been down here, trudging through the mud, but it had been long enough for the river
to take its toll. Several of the slaves were all but gone, only bones and a few rags of skin still tangled in their chains, but many of the others looked almost whole except for the places where fish and other river creatures had gnawed at them. The leader, whose grim determination seemed to have drawn the rest along after him, had lost both eyes, one arm, and most of the fingers from his remaining hand, but still he moved forward through the dark water, one bony, tattered foot in front of another, his fellows stumbling or floating behind him, depending on how much of them remained. When I saw all those empty eye sockets I understood why the poor bastards were headed in the opposite direction from the shore.
I moved toward them as quickly as I could through the slippery ooze, trying to get their attention by waving my arms, but my cannonball sinker made me no faster than them, and even though I got closer I couldn’t attract the attention of any of them, least of all the blind leader. He marched past me, and the rest of the chained, doomed group followed him. I got close enough to grab at one of them, but the arm came away in my hand and the one who had lost it didn’t even seem to notice.
Too far gone, I realized. However long they had been down here, there was not enough left of them, either in body or in thought, to survive on the surface. The kindest thing I could do was leave them marching on as they were, to be pulled apart by fish or to rot gently into pieces and become one with the river.
One of the most profound lessons of Hell was how little an angel could actually accomplish. I had learned that lesson again and again since I’d been here, but never as clearly as this.
The chained slaves hobbled slowly away, vanishing within moments into the floating murk of the river bottom, invisible to my stinging eyes.