Happy Hour in Hell

fourteen: sinners for sale

MY EYES were burning and I was spitting out foul dust. We had been climbing through termite-nest dwellings on Abaddon’s outskirts for a few hours, miles of piled mud, filth, and broken stone, but still hadn’t found a way to the next level.

“How far until we get out of here?” I asked.

“Baddon? Dunno.” Gob contorted his small face into a mask of thoughtfulness. “Never been to the very uppest of it. Long. Far.”

I cursed. Swearing in Hell seemed a bit like coals to Newcastle, but it was an old habit. “And what’s beyond?”

“Highwards?”

I decided he meant “upward.” “Both ways, if you know.”

Gob seemed to have decided I was some variety of harmless crazy. It didn’t make for loyalty, but like most children, even immortal ones, he was game to hang around as long as things interested him. “Down below Baddon, that’s Airbus. Black all the time. Don’t go there.”

Erebus. The highest of the Shadow Levels. Lameh had given me enough information to know I definitely wanted to steer clear. Erebus was where the serious mayhem began, the levels of torment and despair. “Above?”

“Above Baddon? Dunno. Think next is Asdull Medders, where the Sinner Market is.”

I perked up a little. Archangel Temuel’s errand was to someone named Riprash who worked at the Sinners’ Market, which meant that Gob must be talking about Asphodel Meadows (a place which, even though it was in the middle levels of Hell, was probably going to be much grimmer than its charming little name). For the first time I felt a little hope that I might actually accomplish something useful. Caz would almost certainly be with Eligor in the uppermost levels far, far above us, in Hell’s equivalent of Park Avenue. But if I found Riprash I could discharge my obligation to my boss and maybe even get some help. “Gob, could you help me find my way to the Sinners’ Market?”

The kid looked me up and down. With his straggly hair, scrawny limbs, and massive eyes, he looked like an anorexic PowerPuff Girl. “Maybe. Cost you another spit.”

“Sure.” Since I didn’t have a single spit to give him at the moment, I had no problem promising a bonus.

“Thinking ’bout it,” he said as I got wearily to my feet.

He was a hard, cold little thing, my guide. I’d been poking bits of information out of him as we traveled through the narrow, crowded byways of Abaddon. As it turned out, unlike most of Hell’s inhabitants, Gob really had been born here. Hell’s citizens broke down into three basic types: the Neverborn, who were angels and other high beings condemned here by God; the Damned (which kind of speaks for itself as a category); and the small leftovers called Ballast. Gob was one of these, a child whose mother had been sent to Hell while he was still in her belly. She had, by some unpleasant linkage of their souls, given “birth” to him here, surrounded by screams and horror-mask faces, then later wandered off to explore her own damnation. Ballast—the extra weight in the hold of a ship, something nobody bothers to save when the vessel is sinking. That was Gob. He’d grown up motherless in the anarchy of Abaddon’s filth, with no family but the overseer who bossed him and his little fellow thieves and murderers. As I was coming to understand, though, Gob had something the others didn’t. Not kindness, or even concern for anyone else—that doesn’t really grow in Hell—but I think maybe curiosity.

He was a strange kid, by any standard. Each night, whenever we determined it was night, he made a bed for himself in the same animal way, lying down in dirt or weeds or even prickling nettles, which he scarcely seemed to notice. First he would sniff (he could never explain why, except the spot had to smell “right”) then he would lie on his side, knees to his chin, and slide and roll around until he had made a little hollow of whatever was underneath him. Then he’d arrange himself back into the original chin-to-knees position, close his eyes, and fall asleep as quickly as it takes me to say it. Sometimes when Gob slept he made little animal sounds, wordless whimpers and choked squeals that in his dreams or memories might have been full-throated screams. I tried not to imagine what kind of things chased him in his sleep.

When he was awake he was pretty entertaining too, in a sad sort of way. He jumped at any noise as if he had heard a gunshot. When we stopped to rest during daylight hours (if you could dignify the sullen red light with that name) Gob didn’t really sit down or relax, but just perched on something or stood and waited impatiently for me to get moving again. He didn’t try to convince me not to rest, but he didn’t like pausing during the day. Always aware, always shifting his body in small ways to watch his surroundings, constantly ready to run away or fight, he reminded me of some of the things I’ve seen about African child soldiers, little boys who had gone pretty much from their mother’s breasts to committing random homicides.

Hell must be a lot like being born in the middle of a war, I decided: there was no chance for anything better to develop. I could almost imagine Gob as a little machine, a thing that had survived intact this long because it did exactly the right things and would keep doing those things even if it was miraculously transplanted into some other situation, like San Judas. I’d known a lot of street kids, but almost all of them had something that showed they were human, a shallow loyalty to each other if nothing else. Hell must grind that out of everyone, I decided. What relationship could survive being worn away over thousands of years of big and little torments?

Hell is a big cylinder. Imagine somebody dug a hole down into hardened lava, all the way down to where it gets squishy and murderously hot again. Now, remember those cake tins Grandma Flossie used to send you at Christmas with ugly-ass fruitcakes in them, year after year? Take a near infinite number of those tins and stack them in the hole on top of each other, so the bottom is in molten goo and the top of each tin is the bottom of the next. That’s pretty much the infernal layout. There are cities on every level but also lots of wilderness roamed by bandits, monsters, and worse stuff. Remember, it’s Hell, so they made it big. Even with the more enlightened sentencing laws of the last hundred years or so, it still has to hold billions upon billions.

And I had to get to the top, or near it, to reach Caz. I knew there was a sort of elevator system—they call them “lifters”—that ran right up through the middle of Hell’s layers like the string of a necklace, but that was like knowing there’s an elevator in Montana when you’re on the Oregon coast. The famous rivers of Hell, Styx and Acheron and the others, also provide a way to travel, but first you have to be near a river, which we weren’t. So at least while I handled my boss Temuel’s errand, I had to make my way up through Hell one slice at a time. Even with Gob’s help, it took a couple of days just to find our way to the next level of Abaddon.

To my surprise, Gob decided to stick with me once we reached the next level, a dismal wasteland of stone and mud and smoking sulfur so godawful even the damned avoided the place. There were settlements, of course, but they were like the smallest, poorest, hottest, driest cattle stations in the Australian outback, if someone had pounded on them for a week with a fifty ton hammer made of compacted fly shit.

Don’t get me wrong: Abaddon was better than most of Hell, but it was still fucking horrible. I don’t know how long we climbed through its levels, from one parched landscape the color of dried shit to another, past ugliness and misery so vast I stopped paying attention, but it must have been at least a week before we found ourselves somewhere different.

Asphodel Meadows was more open than Abaddon, perhaps because the great stone ceiling seemed farther away here, and it was certainly less dry and desolate, but it made up for dry with boiling swamps that could only be crossed by walking on bobbing, leathery leaves, some of which looked (and were, it turned out) more like Venus fly traps than lily pads. We spent days in the weird, twilight swamps, sloshing through mud and kicking our way through thorny vines, dodging murderous flora and fauna and generally besieged by ugly buzzing insects the size of sparrows. To add to the charm, many of the brackish ponds in Asphodel Meadows were surrounded by the bodies of the damned, purple and bloated but still twitching. Poison didn’t kill you in Hell, it just made you suffer and suffer and suffer.

What terrible thirst had driven them down to drink from such obviously unsafe waters? I patted the canteen-bag Gob had stolen for us somewhere back in Abaddon, which we had filled the last time at a clean but unpleasant-tasting spring bubbling up at the edge of the Meadows. The bag had clearly been made from the innards of something or someone I didn’t want to think about, but right now the water in it was all that kept us from joining those bulging near-cadavers, some of them split and venting gases but still not managing to die. I couldn’t exactly feel good looking at these victims of thirst, but I sure could feel grateful I wasn’t one of them.

I was afraid I was beginning to understand Hell.

The flat leaves felt as treacherous to walk on as floating plywood, not to mention that plywood doesn’t bite, but it kept us out of the frothily poisonous water. The fly traps generally left us alone—we were probably a bit too big to digest—but a few of the bolder ones decided we were worth a try. I pulled Gob out of one of them as it folded on him, just before the pencil-sized spines that served as the thing’s teeth sank into his flesh. His leg was all covered with hissing goo. The stuff splashed me as well and it burned like battery acid. When we staggered off the last leaf a few moments later and onto a patch of comparatively dry ground, we immediately threw ourselves down and rolled in the mud like water buffalo, desperate to stop the pain. It took a long time to rub the toxic sap off us, but even so, Gob barely made a sound. That amazed me, since pieces of his skin were coming off his leg in tatters. It was obvious that the crybaby got kicked out of most people down here pretty quickly.

Out of the swamps at last, we climbed talus slopes of spiky, salty crystals and even staggered through a forest of dead trunks in a flurry of caustic snow. Yes, it snows in Hell. All that “until Hell freezes over” stuff is nonsense. It snows in Hell all the time. It just isn’t frozen water. I won’t spend a lot of time talking about it because it’s disgusting, but I traveled through quite a few snowstorms in Hell. Some of them were acid, some were flurries of frozen piss, some of the things that piled up in drifts as we staggered through the gusts weren’t even liquids. But all of them stung.

By the time we’d slept three or four more times, the empty spaces of the Asphodel Meadows began to resemble something a little closer to their name: dark, boggy moors covered with pale flowers. Fog crept in as we squelched across them, eventually obscuring the landscape almost completely. In the mist I could see shapes, many of them upright, but if they saw us they never let on. Instead they wandered among the asphodel stalks, plucking the gray blooms and stuffing them in their mouths as tears dribbled down their cheeks. Eventually, I managed to work out from Gob’s answers that everybody in Hell ate the asphodel flowers in some form, baked into bread or flat cakes (I’d had a few of these; they were bland, even bitter, but mostly unremarkable) but that those who ate the flowers raw experienced the sins of their lives over and over, like a bad acid trip. Worst of all, though, was that the more they consumed and the more they wallowed in their own terrible mistakes and cruelties, the more of it they wanted. The few asphodel-eaters I saw up close had staring eyes and twitching fingers, like Hieronymus Bosch crackheads.

It was hard to remember that, compared to many, these creatures were among Hell’s most fortunate, the few who’d managed to find a place of relative freedom for themselves somewhere between an eternity of slavery in the houses of the demon lords and an eternity in the torture pits.

Eternity? That still stuck in my craw. I knew that some of these people must have been the worst sort of folks when they were alive, murderers, rapists, child molesters. I honestly didn’t mind them getting even a few centuries of hellfire, but . . . forever? Even if the damned remembered who they were and what they’d done to get there (unlike me and my angelic friends at the Compasses) how meaningful could any punishment be after a million years? How many of these walking phantoms could even remember what they’d done? And what about the ones like Caz, who had been driven to their crimes by others? She’d killed her husband, sure, but if anyone had deserved to get stabbed into a bloody hash, that guy had.

I couldn’t stop thinking about it as we trudged through those misty, treacherous meadows, past rows of nodding, death-pale blossoms, the little damned Ballast-boy following at my heels like a feral dog, perhaps having the most fun he’d ever had in his squalid, miserable (but still nearly endless) life. God knows I tried to stop dwelling on the horror of it, but the unwanted thought kept coming back to me again and again.

Eternity? Really?

We began to see signs of life beside the gloomy, solitary flower-eaters and the endless mist.

The first evidence of civilization was that the faint track Gob had been following finally became something more substantial, a road trod through the swampy grasses and down to the stony soil. We began to see houses, too, although it’s ridiculous to use such a word to describe the mean little piles of reeds and stones. Perhaps the inhabitants lived off the flower-eaters somehow, robbed them or sold things to them. Perhaps they harvested flowers and sent them by boat up the crap-colored streams that were beginning to be more common. I didn’t know and I didn’t care, because now I could see the walls of a city in the distance, which had to be Cocytus Landing, and that was where the hard part of my journey would begin.

All I’d had to do so far was keep myself moving forward and avoid obvious mistakes, but now I would be making contact with this guy Riprash, the demon I was supposed to give Temuel’s curious message. I would rather have gone straight for Caz, but I didn’t dare leave the Mule’s errand for later: I had a feeling that when it was time to leave Hell, I might be leaving in a hurry. So Sinners’ Market first, then, if I survived, on to Pandaemonium, the capital of Hell, a mere few hundred levels or so straight up, the demons and freaks getting thicker around me with every step.

It took us half a day to find the ford over one of the Cocytus’s last tributaries, a narrow spot where bug-plated demons pulled an ancient barge back and forth on ropes across the steaming river. When I couldn’t produce any money for the fare, one of them kindly offered to take Gob instead, but we settled on a small cup of my blood, which they acquired with the quick slash of a dirty blade. My demon-blood looked blacker than human blood, but that might just have been the weird light.

If I’d thought Abaddon was ugly, I was going to have to find a new word for Cocytus Landing, which looked like it had been discarded next to the river by some glacier with a grudge. You’ve heard of shantytowns, right? Well, Cocytus Landing was pretty much a shanty city, as cheaply and dangerously constructed as the meanest hovels of Abaddon but on a much grander scale, a monstrous, multilevel, walled slum centered on its river docks.

The first difference I noticed between this and Abaddon was the industriousness. Not everybody was working, of course, but a major chunk of the populace seemed to be doing something, whether hauling spiky logs on creaky wooden carts, or whipping the slaves and other beasts of burden who pulled those carts, or loading and unloading the bizarre ships that bobbed at anchor all along the docks. Visiting Heaven was like a century tripping on E, all laughing and singing and dancing and not caring or even remembering. Hell was gritty and dirty, but things actually worked. The damned made things, struggled for existence, struggled to avoid pain. They ate and shat and fornicated just like people. But they would suffer forever.

As we made our way along the river toward the walls, I watched a stunning variety of ships on their ways in and out of port. Many looked like they’d been turned into boats only as an afterthought, weird arrangements of canvas, wood, and what looked like bones that didn’t seem like they could possibly float. It struck me then that I hadn’t seen any technology more advanced than you could have found in a European city during the low Middle Ages. All work was done by the brute strength of laborers, occasionally aided by the power of water or fire. I saw water wheels spinning along several of the river’s branches, and buildings that might have been mills or foundries looming crookedly beside the wheels. I couldn’t help wondering if this technological embargo was a rule of the Highest or some bizarre quality of Hell itself.

At the city gates, we joined the crowd funneling past a couple of dozen squat, muscular demons from the Murderers Sect. These soldiers seemed to be examining the passersby carefully, so I dragged Gob into the shadow of a tall peddler’s wagon and we went through the gate that way, out of the driver’s sight but picking up bits of spilled rubbish and putting it back on the cart as if it was ours.

The streets of Cocytus Landing were almost as narrow as the most claustrophobic back rows of Abaddon, but many, many times more crowded, and not just with sullen slaves and demon overseers, either. Many of the creatures we saw seemed to live their lives right out in public, eating, drinking, fucking, and fighting, often in the middle of the street, while the rest of the city’s inhabitants just swept around whatever was going on, as if the squirming bodies were stones in the middle of a fast-flowing river. As I looked closer I noticed that the folk making themselves so free seemed to be the demonic overseers more than the damned, although it wasn’t always easy to tell which was which in that zoo of exotic, disgusting bodies.

We waded on through the ugly crush, past creatures with faces like sad turtles and bewildered insects, creatures with crippled bodies and skin covered with running sores, even a few things that were almost nothing but one large running sore. The entire city breathed screams and moans around us like the horns of a bad downtown rush hour. Just as I was convinced I couldn’t take another moment of it, I spotted a great pool of torchlight ahead of us that seemed to be the source of the loudest cries, and I guessed that must be our destination, Sinners’ Market, the place where slaves were bought and sold.

Just ignore this other shit and find Riprash, I reminded myself, like I was calming a child. Then you can go after Caz, remember? Just keep taking steps.

I could almost see her in front of me then, a small, shining thing against all the darkness of this dark place, and for a moment I was calm. I had something to do. All this horror was for a reason. I couldn’t afford to forget that.

Weirdly, as I thought of her, a noise rose above the caterwauling crowds, a thin thread of music, slow and mournful. It was a woman’s voice, or at least something female, and the wordless melody was so old and simple and arresting that I’m sure it had been sung beside some great river on Earth thousands of years ago and is probably still heard today; some ageless lament of women squatting in the muck beside the Indus or the Nile, washing their clothes. Here, it probably came from some toad-thing who had been in Hell so long she couldn’t remember the Euphrates mud between her toes, but somehow she still remembered the tune, and croaked it to herself as she patted together cakes of excrement to dry and burn for fuel.

It gave me chills. It was the most human thing I’d heard either in Hell or in Heaven, and for a moment I almost completely forgot where I was. Then somebody got angry and poked out someone’s eye right next to me, and the moment was over.

The Sinners’ Market is about as nice a place as it sounds. It’s largely held under the roofed perimeter of a ruined and ramshackle stone coliseum, although during my visit the huge open area in the middle was being used as well. What was sold in the market was . . . well, sinners, to be used as slaves.

Most of these shackled damned were already slaves, and would go from one kind of specialized slavery to another. But just because these were valuable possessions—many of whom had been trained to do specific jobs or even physically altered so they could do them better—didn’t mean they were treated well. I had been seeing how the ordinary folk of Hell treated each other, and it was truly horrifying, but now I was seeing what organized cruelty looked like, and the sheer weight of Hell as an institution suddenly became clear to me. I would see worse things in Hell, and God knows I’d suffer worse things, but nothing ever stepped on my spirit as badly as those first few minutes in the clanking, begging, wailing, and roaring of the Sinners’ Market. It was like coming to the end of some very long scientific article and then finding the summary: The universe is shit.

We asked around about Riprash, and at last got an answer from a cold, cat-eyed female creature whose slaves all looked like children or other small, innocent things; as I walked past, they set up a pathetic wailing from their cages, pleading, barking, mewing. As the she-demon impatiently told me where to find Riprash, I couldn’t help noticing that Gob was keeping his eyes very focused for once, watching me and nothing else. Maybe the bruised and bleeding children in cages hit a little too close to home.

Halfway around the lopsided stadium bowl, we found the large stall the cat-thing had described. A crude sign declared, “Gagsnatch Bros., Dealers in Offal and Slaves.” I guessed that the Gagsnatch Brothers must be the single obese body with two arguing heads that were bickering with each other and several other demons at the rear of the stall. I didn’t want the owner, though, just his overseer, so I made my way through the crush of stinking bodies, doing my best to ignore what was actually going on as I looked for Temuel’s contact. It was kind of like a spy movie but with a lot more human feces.

I found my quarry attended by several smaller demons as he inspected a crew of newly arrived slaves, creatures whose humanity had been so thoroughly tormented out of them that they made no whimper and didn’t even look up, but just crouched in the dirt, wheezing. I couldn’t help thinking that if the infernal Adversary himself were defeated this afternoon, there would still be work here for a million angels for a million years just to begin to repair the damage. As it was, though, the Highest apparently wasn’t feeling too disposed to mercy, or the Adversary was truly beyond forgiveness. Either way, nothing was going to change here until the end of time.

Riprash was a massive ogre twice my size, with huge flat toes and fingers and a face that would have been phenomenally ugly even without the scar, which I’ll describe in a second. He was hairless except for bristling brows, with a smashed gourd of a nose and huge blocky teeth that looked like they could crush stone. But the scar was really something else, if “scar” is even the right word: Riprash had a gouge chopped into his head from temple to nose that had obliterated one eye and covered the socket with scar tissue. I say “chopped” because the weapon was still lodged in there—an ax blade, it looked like. I could see the dull chunk of metal resting right in the meat of the ogre’s brain, because the hole in his skull had never closed. You get the point. Riprash wasn’t pleasant to look at.

I waited until he stopped growling at his underlings. Two of them turned and scurried away, but the third hesitated. It was a hairy little thing like an upright and slightly pear-shaped cat, with an unpleasantly near-human face, and it was looking right at me—really getting an eyeful. Whatever its interest was, I had lots of reasons for not wanting attention, so I glared at the bug-eyed little thing in my best Hellish Nobility Offended kind of way until it got nervous and hurried after the others.

Riprash had noticed me. “What do you want?”

He didn’t sound either interested or friendly, but I wasn’t going to get uppity with the hired help, especially not help that weighed more than my car back home. Lameh’s implanted memories suggested I now looked or smelled (or whatever) like middling Hell nobility, a sort of white-collar demon. That meant I probably outranked this Riprash guy. Yeah, in theory. But he was the strong right hand of an important and rich slave merchant. The stall was one of the biggest at the market, long as a football field and crowded as an Arabian bazaar. He clearly didn’t feel any need to kowtow, and I took my cue from that.

“Talk faster,” he said. “Busy day.”

“If you’re Riprash, I need to talk to you.”

He gave me a look of calculated irritation, but didn’t fold me up like a dirty hankie, which is what he looked like he wanted to do. “So talk.”

“I think . . .” Nobody seemed to be paying attention to us, but if my message wasn’t as innocuous as it sounded, I wasn’t certain I wanted to take the risk of anyone even seeing me deliver it. “I need to speak to you in private.”

His thick lip curled. “Piss on you, my lord. If you’ve got a bribe to offer, talk to my master, not me. I won’t cheat on him, not for all the treasure and cooze in Pandaemonium.”

“No, no!” I said. “It’s not a bribe, it’s a message. And not for Gagsnatch. For you.” I did everything but waggle my eyebrows like Groucho to help him get the subtext. “I just think it would be safer . . .”

I was interrupted by shouting from behind me, voices raised above even the roar of Gagsnatch Brothers ordinary chorus of bellows and howls. As we turned to look, a scrawny demon dashed toward us from the nearest knot of workers, his batlike ears laid flat against his skull in alarm.

“Boss says look sharp, Master Riprash! Make sure everything’s on the up!”

“Why?” Riprash didn’t seem to have many other facial expressions besides Annoyed and Dangerous.

“The Commissar’s showed up of a sudden. He and his lot are poking their noses in all over. They’re going from stall to stall looking for somebody.”

“Commissar Niloch?” The ogre clearly wasn’t happy to hear it, and now I wasn’t happy either. The bat-eared minion skittered away to spread the word to other parts of the large establishment. “What in the name of Astaroth’s swinging udders is he up to? Old Flaps and Scratches usually doesn’t make a show of himself until later in the season when he comes for his tribute.”

Now the stir had become more general as a few helmeted Murderers Sect guards came swaggering into the stall at the far end. When I quickly turned away again, Riprash was looking at me. He must have seen the panic in my eyes.

“You don’t want to be seen by Murder Sect, do you?” His remaining eye roved from me to little Gob and back again. “Not a friend of the Commissar’s, I take it?”

I didn’t dare say a word, because almost anything I could say suddenly struck me as potentially the wrong thing. Heavily armed demon soldiers were shouldering into the stall in bunches now. The slavers and even the slaves had fallen silent, nobody wanting to attract attention, and there was no way I could walk out again unnoticed. This wounded giant had my immortal soul in his huge hands, and there was nothing more I could do.

“Over here, then.” Riprash folded a giant hand over my shoulder and shoved me into a stumbling trot toward the back of the stall, where all kinds of cages had been dumped. Most were empty, but one was so full of slaves that arms and legs stuck out between every bar, and even the growing sense of terror settling over Gagsnatch’s establishment had not stopped their quiet noises of pain. “These need to be washed. Nobody with sense will want to look for you there.” The ogre fumbled a huge key out of his ragged garment and threw open the door of the cage, dealt bonebreaking blows to the few prisoners foolish enough to try to leave, then shoved me in. Gob scrambled in on top of me. I say “on top” because there was literally nowhere else to go. The entire cage, not much bigger than an old-fashioned phone booth, was crammed with the hideous, filthy bodies of damned slaves. They were so beaten down I heard only a few snarls of complaint as I pushed as far into the middle as I could get. The two or three prisoners who had been displaced by my entrance were only too happy to move back to the bars and the comparatively fresh air to be found just outside of a slave cage in the middle of Hell.

I got into an awkward crouch so that I had less chance of being crushed and a slightly better angle to see what was going on. Our end of the stall was rapidly filling with demon guards, most of them closer in size to Riprash than to me. The Commissar’s soldiers moved with the grace of water buffalos on fire, knocking over everything that wasn’t staked into the ground, stepping on everything that was, and yanking on the neck chains of uncaged slaves until I heard vertebrae snap. It was like watching a troop of baboons investigating a structure made of twigs and meat. Yet even these inhuman monstrosities turned up their noses at our cage and did no more than jab with their spears at a few of the more exposed slaves, just for fun.

After awhile the soldier-demons got bored with pulling things apart and began to wander out of the stall. I was beginning to feel I might actually survive the afternoon when a new group stomped into view, looking like nastier and more serious versions of the first thugs, and immediately began throwing slaves and slavemasters alike to the floor of the stall. Then the Commissar walked in.

I swear I felt something like a shock of cold air before I saw him, along with the faint smell of vinegar and something rotting, then the Commissar came into my view and paused before the only employee of Gagsnatch Brothers still standing, namely Riprash.

The newcomer was not one of those demons who waste a lot of energy trying to look like anything human. In fact, at first I could barely tell where Commissar Niloch began and everything else left off, because he was covered with rattling, bone-white tendrils that curled out of his black armor like stray hairs, making him look a little like one of those fancy, frilly seahorses you only see in aquariums. His face was a bit like a seahorse’s too, long, angular, and bony, but no seahorse ever had such evil little blood-drop eyes.

“Oh, my good heart, what have we here?” Niloch was almost as tall as Riprash, but despite his armor and helmet, the rattling bone-tendrils made him seem as fragile as the slenderest branching coral. Still, I don’t think anyone could have looked at the Commissar’s hideous, gleeful face and imagined mere strength would defeat such a creature. “Oh, my charitable works! What is this? A bottom-dweller, a shit-sucker, who does not bow to the Commissar of Wings and Claws, master of all the Meadows and beyond? But why would someone thwart me when all I wish to do is kindness?” He extended an insectoid arm crusted by a whorl of horns. “Why do you insult me, fellow? Why do you hate your rightful master so?”

Even listening to his lilting voice made my stomach turn over. It was as if someone had taken the skin off your favorite grandfather and made a balloon, then let the air squeak out of it in musical bursts. I would gladly have burrowed down into the dung and stayed there forever to avoid that bony, clicking thing noticing me.

Riprash, I guess, was made of sterner stuff. “I waited until you were close enough to show you proper respect, Commissar.” The ogre lowered his vast body to one knee, but I could tell he didn’t like this Niloch much.

“Ah, to be sure, to be sure. And what slave would not risk the anger of the Lord of Wings and Claws to protect his employer’s slaves from being disturbed? What is it you attend so closely here?” Niloch’s jaw, a hinge of horn at the base of his equine skull, splayed to reveal a row of teeth that seemed too different and too long for even that strange mouth. I guessed it was a smile. “What property of your master’s are you so diligently protecting, hmmm?” He took a step forward, his legs creaking and sawing as his tangles of bone rubbed together. “What could be worth keeping even from beloved Niloch? Hmmmm?” Another step forward, until the rattling thing was only a few paces from the cage where I squatted with the other terrified prisoners. Riprash started to get up, but Niloch pointed at him. “Do you object to my inspection? That is a serious matter, slave. Souls have gone into the holes between stars over less.” The fluting voice rose. “Would you obstruct Commissar Niloch at his rightful duties?”

For a moment, against all sense, I prayed that Riprash would do something crazy, run, shout, hit the Commissar in his bony face, anything that might cause enough ruckus to allow Gob and me to escape. Then I remembered that we were locked in a cage. Even if they burned the stall to the ground, we weren’t going anywhere.

Riprash made a rumbling noise deep in his chest, but didn’t say anything. Then his big head dipped. He stayed on one knee. “Course not, Lord Commissar. Our place is yours.”

“Ah, lovely.” Niloch spat a long thread of something onto the ground. “That’s all right then. I’ll just come over and have a closer look at these, shall I?” And so he did, stinking of death and vinegar.