by Tad Williams
I did. It was gray as old meat, and it felt like it as well, spongy and giving beneath my soles. I didn’t like it much, but it wasn’t the worst feeling in the world, at least not until I was halfway, at which point I felt the bottoms of my feet getting moist. Within a few more steps I was sloshing ankle deep in fluid. The path seemed almost to cling to my feet each time I put them down. The whole thing reminded me of something but I couldn’t quite figure out what, until just before I stepped off onto the front porch.
A tongue. I was walking on a huge tongue. I all but leaped from the end in my hurry to get off it. When I turned back I could see the furrow down the middle, the little bumps that had allowed it to taste me, the shine of the saliva that was even now draining back into the coarse pores. It was all I could do to stay upright.
Niloch’s slaves had taken off his boots, and as he walked up the path behind me, his cloud of horny extensions shaking gently around him, he muttered little endearments at the thing: “Oh, yes, my hungry beauty. Ah, you like that? Goodness, you do! I trod on that one—it squealed like a puppy. Is it sweet? Yes, between my toes.”
I turned away. The toes in question were like armor-plated worms wriggling against the soft, gray flesh of the tongue, and Niloch kept stopping to let the path enjoy them. No sane person should have to see that.
Niloch gestured for me to go inside. It was too late to run, so I stepped forward. The entry hall was a chaos of monstrous angles and pools of shadow. Things scuttled past that I didn’t want to look at too closely.
“Why so dark?” Niloch asked, with just a hint of impending mayhem, and several slaves, small creatures like burned apes, leaped forward to begin spinning wheels set into the wall. Translucent spheres mounted on the wall began to glow, driving many of the smallest crawlers back into hiding.
“What do you think?” the commissar asked. Slaves were removing his armor. I turned away, not eager to see more of Niloch’s horrible form. “My lanterns are as good as anything in the Red City, you must admit. There is a gas that seeps from beneath this hill that feeds flame. It is why I made my home here. Long after the last lamp is extinguished, lights blaze in Gravejaw House. They can be seen for miles and miles!”
His slaves stepped away. Niloch now wore something like a camel’s saddle blanket, a shapeless black thing that could have been a housedress, covered with splotches that might have been a pattern or just Niloch’s breakfast mess, the whole thing stretched over his protrusions like a very ugly parade float waiting to be unveiled.
“Now come, my dearest,” he said. “You will dine with me, charming Snakestaff, oh, most certainly. After the poor fare of a slave ship you will be pleased to see what my kitchen can provide!”
I was ushered into a long, low hall. The huge table was solid stone pitted with holes that I only realized later were actually drains. A pair of battered-looking slaves hurried me to my seat, little more than a stone lump beside the table. Niloch had a more elaborate chair, a kind of trestle under a canopy of wrought-iron antlers that duplicated the curls of horn hidden by his caftan. Strange creatures clung to the wall, things like inside-out lizards and globby things as shapeless as amoebas. Some were servants, as it turned out, and some were on the dinner menu, but they all came when Niloch called.
With help from his slaves, the commissar clambered up onto the trestle and bestrode it like a saddle, so that he was a good twice my height. He seemed to enjoy that, his sideways jaws positively clacking with good cheer. “Ah, yes,” he called, “so good to be home! And now, feed us! Bring us out all the finest delicacies! Your master is back and we have a guest!”
I won’t tell you much about the meal. You’re welcome. Everything was still alive, and I wouldn’t have eaten any of them by choice even if they weren’t. As it was, though, I had to smile and pretend to enjoy the feeling of scrabbly little legs in my mouth, or the whimpers of something that didn’t enjoy being chewed. Dessert? Dessert was alive too, even after it had been doused in something and lit on fire. Niloch insisted I try it before it stopped shrieking.
The only thing that saved me was the demon body I was wearing, which apparently had literally more stomach for this sort of thing than I did. I managed to get a few things down but knew I would spend the rest of my life, however short, trying to forget this meal.
“Now, my good fellow,” Niloch said when the last plate of quivering ruin had been cleared away, “you must tell me of your travels after this unfortunate kidnapping.” He gestured for the nearest slave to pour something lumpy as gravy into my cup. “You must have seen some wonderful sights in Abaddon. Did you visit the Fountain of Pus? Travelers come from many levels above and below just to see it! Lovely!”
I did my best to sound like a disgruntled petty noble complaining about his unwanted trip to the depths, of course. Niloch’s questions were sympathetic at first, but after a while I began to think he was trying to trip me up, pulling out little inconsistencies and asking me with poison sweetness to explain them.
“You see,” he told me after I had finished one long, self-conscious answer, “there are things afoot, my sweet, oh, yes. Apparently an outsider,” he said the word with a hissing emphasis, “has got into Hell through one of the old, disused gates.”
“Outsider? Got in?” I was suddenly finding it hard to talk, despite the absence of small kicking things in my throat for the first time in an hour. “Who . . .?”
“Who would be so rude as to enter our fair lands without making themselves known—especially if they were sent by You-Know-Who?” He gave me a look. If those little red eyes could have twinkled, they would have, but instead they just sat there like drops of wet paint. “I couldn’t say—but I’m sure you can, my dear Snakestaff?” The eyes went opaque. “Can’t you? Hmmm?”
“But I told you, I didn’t see anything!”
“Oh, come, my squishy, breakable friend. The time for that is over. I am so very certain that you have more to share with me, that I’ve arranged an appointment for you with my court jester, Greenteeth. He’ll jolly it out of you. Come in, Master Greenteeth, I know you’re eager!” he called out. “We’re ready for you now.”
Something waddled in through one of the doorways. It was only about half my height but squat and muscular and slick as an amphibian. I couldn’t see any eyes on it, but it had plenty of mossy, sharp teeth. Far more than a reasonable mouthful. When it reached Niloch’s side he reached down to pet it with a clawed hand as though it were a beloved pet. Invisible bells jingled faintly when the creature moved. He might have been a jester, but I wasn’t laughing.
“You see,” the commissar warbled, “I promised to bring back some new toys from the Shrieking Meat Bazaar for little Greenteeth. Oh, and I did, my sweet lump, I did. He’ll be aching to try them out, and from the way you have behaved at dinner, I suspect you don’t like pain.” Niloch raised a hand as I began my desperate protests. “No, no, do not be foolish, darling one. I’m sure you’re in a hurry to prove me wrong, but we cannot start tonight when you’re weary from your travels. That would dull the piquancy of the thing, would it not? Tired flesh is insensitive flesh.” He raised a hand. Instantly, I was surrounded by burned apes. Their rough fingers closed on my arms and lifted me from my stone seat. “We will begin when the morning beacons are lit, or just a little before,” Niloch said. “I have not had a conversation orchestrated by my beloved Greenteeth for some time. It will be a joyful day.” The commissar patted the thing and it showed its teeth in an even wider grin, until I thought the whole top of its head might fall off and roll away. “Until the morning, then. Take him to his chamber.”
I was dragged deep into Gravejaw House, past weeping animals and scarred servants with empty expressions, then shackled to the walls of a bare, dank stone room. The slaves’ torches reflected from floor and walls slick with various liquids, only a few of which were obviously blood. Just before my captors left me, I heard something screech in a nearby room, a shrill, ragged sound that wasn’t anywhere near human. I was
pretty sure it was another guest being softened up for a session with the commissar and his pal Greenteeth.
The door closed. I heard the heavy bolt being thrown. I thrashed in my chains but could barely move them, let alone break them. With the torches gone, darkness filled the room, a blackness close to absolute.
eighteen
a darkness like death
I STRUGGLED, OF course. Shit, yes, I struggled. I heaved at the chains until every nerve and muscle in my body felt like it was going to burst through my skin, but the links were too heavy and thick even for demon-strength. I tried to pull my hands out through the shackles themselves, but although I tugged until my gray flesh tore against the metal cuffs, in the end I just couldn’t slip them free. If I could have bitten off my own thumbs to make it work I would have—I was that desperate, because I knew that Niloch and his torturer would have me screaming my real name and mission within an hour after starting on me, and then the pain would really begin. But my chains held my hands out at either side of my body, far from my mouth. My legs were free, but my bottom half wasn’t going anywhere without the rest of me.
I was slumped in defeat, exhausted and probably bleeding badly when I heard, or perhaps felt, a whisper of sound in the dark cell.
“. . . And may his every work come undone, and the stink of his shame follow him wherever he goes.”
“Who’s there?” I’ll leave out the pathetic quaver in my voice. “Who said that?”
After a moment of charged silence I heard it again, a little louder this time. “You . . . you can hear me?” The voice was female, or seemed to be, but of course you can’t trust anything in Hell.
“Who are you?” I asked. “Where are you?” Was it another prisoner in a connecting cell? Or just another torment, although more subtle than most of what Niloch had shown so far?
“Who am I? Now there’s a question.” I could almost smell her sour amusement. “When I was, I was Heartspider, the commissar’s favorite.” Again the impression of a laugh, bitter and not altogether sane. “But there have been several favorites since me. If you look around, you’ll see what’s left of them.”
“I can’t see. It’s too dark.”
“Not much left of them anyway. Piles of bones in the corner. Picked clean, for the most part. Niloch’s sticky little torturer gets what’s left, but he’s a messy housekeeper.”
I didn’t want to think about the bones. “But you? Where are you?”
“One of the piles.”
It took me a moment, but then I understood. “You’re . . . you’re dead.”
“Nobody dies here, you poor fool. If they ever cleaned up I could at least go on to do my suffering elsewhere, but instead I’ve been trapped in this place for longer than I can remember.”
A ghost. She was a ghost, or at least the closest thing to it I’d encountered in Hell, her body ruined, all but destroyed, but her soul or spirit still haunting the place where she’d been butchered. And the Sollyhull Sisters thought they had it bad because they were stuck with coffee shops!
“Can you help me?” I asked her. “If you do, I’ll help you.”
“There’s nothing I can do for you.” A long pause this time. “How? How could you help me?”
“You tell me. If I was free, I could carry your bones away from here. Would that help?”
“It might.” For a brief moment I thought I could hear something new in the disembodied voice, but when she spoke it was flat and hopeless again. “But it doesn’t matter. I can’t bring you the key. I can’t command a slave to release you. By my sweet Satan, do you think I’d still be here if I had any power to do anything?” A gust of fury blew through the room, a hatred so intense I could feel it. “I would have made Niloch my own prisoner long ago if I could. I would burn him every day with fire ’til his little red eyes sizzled and popped. I would bind him until his own horns curled back through his flesh. I would tear him and salt him. I would suck his balls out of his vent and chew them like grapes . . .”
My chains rattled as I slumped back against the wall. I shared her hatred; one thing about being trapped in Hell, I was definitely finding it easier to hate. But it did neither of us any good.
Heartspider wore down at last, trailing into whispers. For a long time neither of us spoke. My mind was racing, but like a rat in a maze, each turn led to another dead end.
“The floor,” she said suddenly.
I stirred. “What?”
“The floor. I watched you nearly manage to pull your hands out of the shackles. The floor is slippery with blood and fat. Far more than just my own. A dozen or more after me have been dispatched here and the slaves have not washed it down.”
“So?”
“Try to get some of it onto your wrists. Maybe then you can slip loose.”
I was about to tell her that I could not reach the floor, not nearly, when I realized that I was standing an inch deep in the very muck she was talking about. I lifted my foot as far as I could and heard a dollop of something unpleasant drip from my toes and splatter the floor. I tried again and managed to bend my knee and lift my foot as high as my own waist, but it was still far from my shackles. I twitched, trying to fling the stuff at my wrists, and felt it splash across my chest and shoulder. I tried again. And again.
I don’t know how much later it was when the bolt rattled and the door swung inward, but I had been in complete darkness so long that the light of a single torch was blinding. Bells jingled softly. It was Niloch’s torturer—sorry, “jester”—Greenteeth. The warty thing lurched closer to examine me, its mouth full of poisonous sharpness like a Viet Cong pit trap. The jester was short, but its stunted arms and legs were heavy as a gorilla’s, and though it scarcely topped my waist I had no doubt that Greenteeth outweighed me. I gripped the manacles in my aching hands and wondered when it would notice they weren’t around my wrists any longer.
“Ready, you?” it asked in a disturbingly wet voice. I still couldn’t make out any eyes, but I could tell it was examining me, especially my bloody arms, pawing at my skin and tasting its cold, knobby fingers. “Trying to get free? Of course, of course, but not too much hurt things. Will spoil the music of what soon we do.” It reached out a hand so it could stroke my chest. Even with all the pain I was already in, the clammy touch of the thing made me shudder and flinch backward. “Oh, no. No fear. Together we will work for goodness. Together we will make something wonderful, quite.”
Then Greenteeth finally noticed that I had slipped my cuffs and was only holding them. Still no eyes, but the toothy mouth gaped in surprise. I didn’t give the horror time to raise the alarm, but kicked as hard as I could where I thought it might be vulnerable, somewhere between the legs and the chest. It dropped the torch, which guttered but did not go out, and as it stumbled and fell onto its back, wheezing with what I hoped was severe, crippling pain, I jumped onto it with both feet, then proceeded to leap up and down as hard as I could, paying no attention to the sensation of bones cracking beneath my heels because I had no idea how strong the thing might be. When the body got too slippery for me to maintain my balance I stepped down and started kicking, working its head and chest.
“He won’t hurt you now,” said Heartspider at last. She sounded like she’d enjoyed what had just happened. “Won’t hurt anything, not for a long time.”
But there was a frenzied anger in me that wouldn’t let go, and I kicked the rubbery, broken thing another half dozen times, seeing dim sprays of fluid in the half-light and liking the way they looked. When I stopped I was gasping, and my heart beat like a stamping press set on high, but all I wanted to do was kick the nasty thing some more. Hell was definitely getting to me.
I found the key on its belt, along with a string of little bells and enough sharp objects to get an entire street gang thrown in jail. I wiped scum off the torch until it burned brightly again, and at Heartspider’s direction I gathered up her bones, still ribboned with leathery shreds of flesh. I had nothing to carry them in, but I found some r
ags stiff with old blood and tied them into a hobo’s bindle, then slung it over my shoulder. The bones clicked against each other as I made my way out into the dark corridor. I swear, they sounded happy.
Heartspider spoke into my ear, making me jump. “If only we could give Niloch the same, but he is too strong for you.”
I had no urge to encounter my host again. “Just tell me where to go. How do I get out?”
“Down. Like most lordlings in Hell, the Commissar of Wings and Claws has many ways in and out of his lair. Down where the boilers are. Down.”
I let her guide me downstairs and across several basement floors. Even in the middle of the infernal night, there were sounds coming from behind doors that made me pray—yes, pray—that I never had to see what was on the other side. The place was a maze, and by the time we found our way down to what Heartspider told me was the lowest level, I was certain that Niloch or his slaves must have noticed the mess I’d left behind, especially because most of it had been his beloved jester.
The bottom room was more like the Roman catacombs, endless arches of heavy stone and gigantic pipes that looked like they might have been made of fired clay, lit by the kind of globe lights I had seen in the entry hall. It looked almost ordinary, like the underbelly of a subway station or some other bit of urban architecture, except for the bulging pipes, and the curses written on the wall by slaves or prisoners in their own blood.
“The breath of the underworld,” Heartspider said when I asked her what the pipes carried. “It fires the lights and Niloch’s machines.”
Which must be the volcanic gas he’d bragged about, the endless supply that had helped make the commissar a powerful lord in these central realms of Hell.
I could hear noises drifting down from above now, voices shouting and the slap of feet. I knew I didn’t have long, so I let Heartspider guide me through the maze of tunnels and pipes. Unfortunately, she didn’t know the bottom level all that well, so I spent as much time retracing my steps as going forward, and each moment I got more nervous. Niloch must be searching the house, and how long before a party would be sent down here? The distances between lights was growing longer; if I hadn’t had the torch I would have never found my way.