by Tad Williams
So, where did that leave me on the big questions? What did I know for certain?
According to Caz, Eligor had made a deal with someone in Heaven, with the marker of that deal being a golden feather. That deal hadn’t necessarily been about the missing souls and the Third Way, but it was an awfully big coincidence timewise if it wasn’t.
Caz’s story (which I wanted to believe, of course, but not being a suicidal idiot had to take with a few grains of salt) was that she had stolen the feather from Eligor as protection and then passed it on to Grasswax when things got hot. Howlingfell said Eligor had sent him to be Grasswax’s bodyguard, which must have alarmed Grasswax quite a bit; Eligor was as much as telling him, “I know you’ve got it.” The deal with Edward Walker’s soul or lack thereof then went down, and by later that same day Grasswax was dead in a very ugly manner that suggested he’d pissed someone off pretty thoroughly or else that they’d wanted information badly, which supported Caz’s story. A short time later, I was entertaining visits from the ghallu, which Caz and Howlingfell had both confirmed was Eligor’s fetch, and that suggested that Grasswax really had told the Grand Duke—probably while vomiting blood—that he gave the feather to me.
Why me? Sure, Grasswax hadn’t seemed to like me much, but pinning it on me still seemed pretty extreme when he must have known he wasn’t going to survive being questioned by Eligor and his minions. I didn’t have the feather, so who had he been protecting? Caz? Didn’t seem in character from a nasty piece of work like Prosecutor Grasswax.
And now I had to fit our young friend Clarence into all this, too. My bosses were spying on me for some reason. Why? Had one of them known that Walker’s soul wasn’t going to turn up, and also knew I’d be on the case? That still didn’t explain much.
A sudden thought from earlier reoccurred to me: what if Eligor wasn’t the only player? What if someone like Sitri wanted the feather too, to blackmail Eligor or whoever the feather belonged to? Could the fat prince have been the one who actually tortured Grasswax, trying to get in on the Great Plumage Hunt? If so, Caz was mistaken…or was lying to me, and so was Howlingfell. But it still didn’t explain where the golden feather was now, or the weird thing my albino buddy Fox had told me about Eligor’s prize: “I smelled it on you.”
You can go crazy with this stuff—wheels within wheels, as Sam put it. Is it any wonder every now and then I have to stop thinking and just do something?
And just to round it all out, I had found a connection between Eligor and Reverend Doctor Habari, the front man for the Magian Society. So what if this whole Third Way mess was some kind of massive, deep-cover fraud Hell was putting over on us to disguise the fact that they’d found a way to shanghai souls before they ever reached judgement? Or a private play for infernal power by Eligor (or Sitri, for that matter)? Either way, the stakes were clearly high, because if Eligor was willing to let his hired demon smash up The Compasses he was obviously more worried about finding the feather than being discreet.
And of course I had to deal with the possibility that the answer was None of the above and that the Magians really did represent some fifth column in Heaven, maybe even the first stages of an attempted coup. We hadn’t had one of those get even close to success since the Lightbringer first tried to snatch the car keys and Daddy took the T-Bird away. Another such revolution from within would be way out of my league, and yet I was right in the middle of it and getting very little support or information from my bosses. As you can imagine, the word “scapegoat” kept coming back to me. It wasn’t a word I liked.
Caz drifted through all these thoughts like a trail of smoke or a hint of some exotic perfume. Had she been using me to get herself off the hook or to push some agenda I couldn’t yet see? That was certainly within the character of her calling. But asking me to believe she had fooled me so completely was asking me to believe that I had learned nothing in all the eventful years of my angelic life, that I was as gullible as the newest halo fresh off the heavenly bus and had fallen in love with an unrepentant hell creature after we spent one night together.
All these possibilities jostled around in my brain like cranky kids kept up too late. At last I gave up trying to figure it all out in one night and called the office to check my conference schedule for Saturday and Sunday: I did not want to be asking Karael rookie questions over our shared breakfast. The very thought of his handsome mouth curling in a little Clint Eastwood smirk of contempt at my helplessness made my scrotum climb to higher ground. Once Alice finished complaining about me (which took several minutes) I got what I needed, plus some information that surprised me a bit and which I put aside to chew over later. Then I called Fatback and left a message on his answering machine (since at this time of day he would still be on the Last Train To Porksville) asking for whatever he could find about the Ralston Hotel, emphasis on escape routes, and also for some info about a few other things that had been troubling me. Since I’d finished the vodka and didn’t want to wait for room service, I took two tiny bottles of Bacardi out of the minibar and began working on them. I still had some orange juice, after all, and any sailor knows that when the weather ahead looks foul, it’s time to break out the rum.
I had been brooding and flipping channels for hours, letting bits of images and sound wash over me—half an inning of a baseball game, some incomprehensible cop drama featuring corpses and forensic labs staffed by improbably good-looking scientists, a local weatherman doing his best to seem responsibly worried as he reported a tiny bit of incoming rain that might force a few folks to roll up their car windows, plus old movies, infomercials, children’s cartoons that seemed to consist mainly of primary colors and loud shrieking—anything that would hold my attention for a few seconds. I finally found a program about soldier ants and even settled into it a little. I confess I might have dozed, or been about to; either way, the knock on the door startled me badly.
One of Prince Sitri’s Easter Island statues blocked the space beyond the chain. For an instant I could only wonder if the modest metal links would keep him out during the second or two it would take me to get to my coat where it hung over the chair and the automatic full of silver bullets in the pocket, but he only made a grunting noise and pushed something through the space between door and jamb—an envelope. When I took it, he turned and walked away, surprisingly quietly for a man (or at least a male human body) big enough to have his own zip code.
The envelope contained a note written on impossibly dainty, almost transparent paper in a finicky little hand that it was hard to feature as the product of Sitri’s immense, pudgy paws.
“If you come down to the lobby bar at midnight you will learn something to your advantage,” it read. At the bottom was a single florid letter “S”.
I wondered why he hadn’t just invited me to the Roosevelt Suite. It didn’t seem likely that Prince Jabba the Hutt and I would be able to have a surreptitious meeting in the crowded lobby, even after midnight, but on the other hand there’d be enough people around that it didn’t seem likely he was going to bump me off, either. I was already in the game and had pretty much bet my house, so I couldn’t afford to ignore the summons. I pulled on my coat, but not before putting on my shoulder holster and making sure that I had a round chambered in my new FN automatic. Nobody wants to be the guy they say, “He forgot to load his gun,” about while shaking their heads grimly.
I didn’t encounter anything in the halls, but I heard enough weird sounds from behind doors to make me hope some local channel was showing slasher movies. The elevator was empty too, although I swear somebody had cranked up the air conditioning way beyond what was reasonable, and I had to suffer what felt like cold breath on the back of my neck all the way down to “L.” Signs and portents. Unfortunately, when you live in my world they’re as ubiquitous as advertising and even harder to sort through for truth.
The lobby was still a busy place, with all kinds of folks from my side and not-my-side going in and out, grouped in chatty little bunches. Lookin
g at a troop of obvious Hellspawn laughing and smoking outside the front door, I wondered how many crimes under investigation by Interpol could have been solved merely by listening in on their cheerful conversation.
The bar was full but not crazy full. I stood for a moment in the doorway looking around for either Sitri or his bodyguards, but even with all the weird looking people in the room I didn’t see any as weird as the prince. Then, at the corner of my eye, something bright caught my attention.
She was sitting at the bar by herself with her back to me, but even without the fall of pale gold hair down her shoulders and back, I would have known that slender shape anywhere, anytime. She wore a black skirt that showed her fine, pale legs and a red cashmere sweater that clung to her like a second skin, displaying the delicate bumps of her spine like a topo map in scarlet. Before I could get a chance to tell myself it might be someone else, fruitlessly denying the knowledge that was throbbing in every nerve of my Earthly body, she turned to the bartender, and I saw her face in silhouette. It was indeed the Countess of Cold Hands, her very own self, just as I had known from the first moment I spotted her. It was Caz, and she was all alone as if waiting for someone. As if waiting for me.
thirty-two
saddest sound i ever heard
THAT WAS an intense couple of seconds, let me tell you. There she sat, staring at the mirror behind the bar, and it was like one of those movies where the single spotlight comes on and everything else goes dark: I couldn’t see anything but her. I had been smothering my feelings so strenuously for the last forty-eight hours or so that the intense wave of longing that rolled through me almost made my knees buckle. She was so beautiful. Her face was perfect.
No, not quite, I realized; that kind of perfection only exists after someone’s used an airbrush on a photo, but Caz came very close. Her only flaw—and it didn’t seem like a flaw to me—was that her high-bridged, slender nose and her fine bones gave her a look of fragility, of something fierce that had known a cage, that knew it could be broken and feared that beyond all else.
She looked young, but also like she might not age well. She looked like she could be damaged and probably would be. But still, my God, she was beautiful.
And in fact she would never age, I suddenly realized. She would appear this way forever, or at least as long as it suited her. Casimira of the Cold Hands would never get any older than this. But that didn’t mean much to me anyway. Chances were good that, one way or another, I wasn’t going to get any older either.
As I moved toward her she seemed to sense my presence, or at least that she was being watched. I wasn’t surprised—it seemed like I’d never stared at anything so intently in my short angelic life. I was so surprised to see her in the Ralston that for a moment I literally couldn’t think of what to say.
She turned and her eyes went wide.
“Hello, Caz,” I managed to say. Clever, huh? I’d like to see you have come up with something better under the circumstances.
The look on her face seemed close to panic. “Bobby, what are you doing here?”
“What am I doing here? What are you doing here?” I suddenly felt conspicuous, but if anyone in the bar was watching us they were being cagey about it. “Why didn’t you call me back?” Now that I stood in front of her I was more than a little angry, but that was only part of the storm that was blowing my emotions this way and that. For those who don’t know anything else, let me just tell you, it’s really weird to live in a human body. You can feel the hormones pumping, feel the hide bristling, skin stretching and shrinking, feel yourself being tugged by fight-or-flight impulses like the animal that you are. Or were. I wanted to grab her, kiss her, drag her to my room, but just as powerfully I wanted to shake her until tears came to those robin’s-egg-blue eyes, make her feel how much I was hurting. Yet another part of me was terrified that one of Eligor’s minions would spot her, and I’d have to decide between some kind of fatal standoff or else stand helplessly and watch them drag her back to the beast she had cheated, a creature that I already knew did not take losing well.
“You can’t be here, Bobby!” She grabbed her drink and downed it and began fumbling in her purse for money to leave on the bar. “He’ll kill you!”
“Who, Eligor?” I was confused. Why was she worried about me instead of herself? Everything seemed to have gone topsy-turvy. “No, this is a summit conference, there’s an official truce. I’ve been ordered to be here and the place is packed with angels. I’m in no danger at all.” Okay, not completely true, but I had bigger worries at the moment. Just seeing her again had me terrified that something might happen to her. Even if she’d lied to me, tricked me. Even if she didn’t care about me at all. “You’re the one who shouldn’t be here, Caz. Your ex owns this whole fucking hotel…” I was startled by something that flickered across her face—something like shame. “Wait,” I said. “You knew that already. You must have. Caz, what are you doing here?”
“Oh, Bobby…” But she was looking over my shoulder now, and the shame was replaced by something else entirely.
“Well, well, well!” said a voice I knew. It lifted the hairs on my neck, which were just starting to relax, right back up again. “Two of the most interesting people I know!”
I spun. The Grand Duke was only a couple of yards away, leaning on the bar, dressed in his Kenneth Vald best, a linen suit and expensive moccasins that made him look like a rich colonial—which, in a sense, he was. Eligor wasn’t from here, but he definitely owned a lot of it.
I wasn’t in any condition to play his game. I didn’t reply, but I didn’t reach for my gun, either. Once I found out he owned the place, I had decided there was a good chance I would bump into him. I had just hoped it would be somewhere I felt safer, like when I was sitting next to General Hard-Ass Karael, Scourge of All Hellspawn.
“Oh, sorry, am I interrupting?” The Horseman was the very soul of graciousness, that blond lord of Hell, cheerful and charming. Now the people in the bar were definitely watching. Eligor swung a lot of weight and not just in San Judas. “Oh, that’s right, I forgot—you two already know each other.” His smile was cold and clean as a surgical blade. “I’m not surprised. You’re both very…enterprising.” He turned to Caz, whose face had gone dead as a doll’s. “But I’m afraid I really do have to interrupt. We have a meeting, Countess. People are waiting for us.” He didn’t beckon or even raise his hand, but she rose from her bar stool and went to stand beside him, obedient as a dog. I met her eyes again, but there was nothing there for me, her expression so empty that I began to wonder if everything else I had seen on her face tonight and those other, more intimate times had just been more of her masks.
“A pleasure to see you, Mr. Dollar, even briefly,” Eligor said. “I hope you’re enjoying your stay.”
“It’s a very nice hotel.” I was determined not to spend the entire conversation in stunned silence. “But, honestly, Vald, some of the people you let in here…!”
Again the smile, meaningless as the grin on a great white shark. “Ah, but the duty of a host is to find a way to accommodate every guest. That’s why I’m so happy to have the Countess back. She is very good at finding what people need and giving it to them.” He started to turn, then paused. “Please, don’t let me rush you off, Mr. Dollar. The lady and I have to go, but I hope you’ll stay and have a drink on me.” He looked up, made eye contact with the bartender. “I’m sure you have lots of old friends who’d love to find you here and catch up on old times.”
He walked away then, graceful and self-assured as a cat, with Caz at his side. I half thought she might turn to look back at me but of course she didn’t.
I sort of collapsed onto the stool Caz had occupied, because at the moment I didn’t trust my legs to carry me across the room. I had been shot in the heart without anybody even pointing a gun at me.
The bartender came to take an order, but after the eye contact between him and his boss, I couldn’t imagine letting him pour me anything so I shook
my head. I felt like someone was waving a big magnet around near my internal compass: I suddenly didn’t know where to go next, what to do. Why was Caz here? Why had she gone back to him? And why had Sitri wanted to send me down here, unless it was just to provoke his rival, the grand duke. Caz had told me she’d stolen the feather and that Grasswax had done something with it, so why would Eligor take her back? Did she have it all along and now had used it to buy her way back into safety? Or was the truth something worse? Had I been played like a sucker from the start?
A heavy hand fell on my shoulder. “Fancy meeting you here,” said another voice I recognized and wished I didn’t. Just the thought of having to go through something like this now made me so tired I almost didn’t answer, but I forced myself to turn and face the unibrow and the nasty little eyes beneath it.
“Howlingfell,” I said. “It’s so nice to see you that I’m even going to say please when I tell you to take your hand off me.”
He smirked and stepped back. He was wearing a shiny new suit that made him look every inch the jumped-up punk he was. That didn’t mean he couldn’t kill me, of course. I know lots of people who were killed by punks. In fact, punks with a grudge are probably the most dangerous type to deal with. Give me a crazy-ass, violent drunk any day.