Happy Hour in Hell

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.

Over what must have been the next couple of days, we raced along the pitchy Styx, past countless disgusting harbors. Riprash wasn’t worried about hiding me from the crew now, since nobody was going ashore, and soon I was spending hours at the ship’s rail watching the coastal towns of Hell slide by.

“Y’see, I been thinking about all this,” Riprash explained to me one night. “It comes to me that maybe it’s time I should be doing something else.”

I was a bit surprised. “Something else? Like what?”

“Bringing the Lifters’ Word to more than just the few,” Riprash said, looking as philosophical as a monstrous giant with a split skull is able to look. “Ever since you brought me that word from you-know-where. I only half-believed Donkeysmile told me a real story until now, y’see, so I never really got up off my haunches to do what I know is right.”

I shook my head in confusion. Riprash explained that a long time before, when he first worked for Gagsnatch, a demon named Donkeysmile had been thrown from another ship, and Riprash rescued him. He found the newcomer to be surprisingly intelligent, good company on the long voyage. Eventually, the newcomer had confessed that he came from somewhere else—in other words, outside of Hell—and passed along the gospel of the Lifters to Riprash. Riprash had been alive so long that he had become, as he put it, “a mite philosophical in my age,” and what the stranger said touched a chord inside him.

I was darkly amused by “Donkeysmile.” If that was what Temuel had chosen to call himself in Hell, then “the Mule,” our nickname for him at the Compasses, had been pretty much right on the money after all. But what had Archangel Temuel been doing in Hell in the first place? Another question that led me nowhere useful.

“But these days, since you came and gave me his words,” Riprash continued, “I’m thinking that there’s more for me to do than just to live on like nothing’s changed. I’m wondering if you coming with Donkeysmile’s message, if that’s like a sign, d’you see? A sign for me that it’s time to do different. To take the Lifters’ message all round, to those who’ve never heard it.”

If Riprash really planned on becoming a missionary in this, the least missionary-friendly place I could imagine, I was glad he and I were going to be parting company pretty soon, probably as soon as we reached Cocytus Landing. I felt bad that I had dropped little Gob in all this, but I told myself the life he’d had in the filth of Abaddon wouldn’t be anything he’d miss much.

I also kept running into Riprash’s strange little employee, the one I had privately named Krazy Kat. He was some kind of bookkeeper, which brought him frequently into Riprash’s presence, and yet every time he saw me he goggled like he had the first time, although he always stopped when he saw that I’d noticed. It was beginning to annoy me and, to be honest, to worry me a little. I asked Riprash where the little catlike fellow had come from.

“Wart? I don’t think he’d been with me for a season before you showed up. He just walked up to Gagsnatch one day, said he’d heard we needed a body could do sums. As it happened, we did, and he’s been with us since. Quiet, and he does seem a bit fixed on you, but other than that I’ve had no trouble from him. I’ll make him come and tell what’s what.”

“I’m not sure—” I began, but Riprash had already sent Gob to fetch him.

“Now,” said Riprash when Gob had returned with the little accountant-creature, “why do you want to be plaguing Snakestaff here with your nonsense, Wart?”

The little fellow looked up in abject terror. He gave a single squeak but otherwise couldn’t summon any useful noises. Out of pity, I convinced Riprash to let me take over the interrogation.

“You’re not in trouble,” I said as reassuringly as I could. “It’s just that I want to know why you’re always looking at me the way you do.”

Now he wouldn’t look at me at all. “Don’t know.”

“Well, think about it. Nobody’s going to hurt you.”

“Lest he tells a lie,” growled Riprash, “’Cause then I’ll have his head right off and eat it,” which probably wasn’t as helpful as the ogre had intended it to be. A good length of time passed before Wart could be roused from his faint, and then it still took a while before his teeth stopped chattering so he could speak.

“Don’t know,” he told me in a tinny little murmur. “Just . . . something about you. Your face. Not those things,” he said, pointing at the bumps I’d added after Vera’s house to disguise myself. “Saw it first time. Feels like . . . I know you. Seen you, anyway.”

But no matter what else I asked him, he couldn’t clear up the mystery. Like a lot of the residents of Hell, little Wart didn’t really remember much about the previous week, let alone the details of his earlier life in Hell. I examined the little demon carefully. He was unexceptional in appearance, at least by hellish standards, somewhere between an alley cat dipped in motor oil and a very ugly lawn gnome, but now that I was really looking hard, there was something about him I couldn’t quite put my finger on, but which nevertheless plucked at my memory. Had I seen him in one of my earliest moments in Hell? If so, his features were so ordinary by local standards I couldn’t believe I’d spent more than a moment looking at him. And if my memory was that good, I should have been out of Hell and cleaning up on Jeopardy.

“Right, Wart, you can go,” Riprash told him at last. “If you think of anything, come tell me, but not in front of anyone but these two,” he said, indicating Gob and me. “Too many ears.”

Wart nodded slowly. “Too many ears,” he said, but the phrase seemed to have caught his attention and he repeated it as if hearing it for the first time. “Too many ears . . .”

The little creature turned to gape at me. I think it came to him just as it came to me.

“Walter . . . ?” I said. “Walter Sanders? Is that you? What are you doing here?”

And it was him, I could see it now through all that weird—Walter Sanders, my angel buddy from back at the Compasses, stabbed by Smyler and missing ever since. Was I hallucinating? Had I been in Hell so long my mind was crumbling? But the little bookkeeper wore an expression that must have been a mirror of mine—the slow dawning, the unlikely facts caught in the bottleneck of logic and unable to slide past.

“Yes,” he said, his words barely audible. “Yes! Walter Sanders. No. Vatriel. That’s my real name.” He looked around the cabin, then looked over Riprash, Gob, and me, blinking as he did so like a slow loris caught in a flashlight beam. “What am I doing here?”

“You don’t know?” Fat lot of good any of this was going to do me. Just more mysteries on top of the ones I already had and didn’t want. “You don’t remember?”

He was shaking his shaggy head when a crewman rapped on the cabin door, urging Riprash to come to the quarterdeck.

Walter and I were no closer to solving what had happened to him between his being stabbed by Smyler and taking a job with Gagsnatch’s Quality Slaves when Riprash shoved open the cabin door. “Trouble,” the ogre said. “Come up.” I’d scarcely ever seen him look worried, but now he really did, the great shelf of his brow frowning until his eyes were almost invisible.

Gob and I and Wart aka Vatriel aka Walter followed him up onto the deck. The shape on the horizon was so small and its lights so faint that it took me a long moment to realize it was a ship.

“What’s the ensign?” Riprash asked Gob. “Use those young eyes.”

Gob climbed up so he could lean out over the rail, then spent a half minute squinting into the foggy darkness. “Bird’s foot,” he said as he scrambled back down to the ogre’s side.

“Feared that,” said Riprash. “That’s the sign of the Commissar of Wings and Claws. It’s Niloch’s ship, The Headless Widow.”

I was frightened but didn’t want to show it. “Charming name.”

“Whole thing is Raping the Headless Widow, but that’s too long for most folks, ’cause they don’t want to talk about that ship much anyway. She runs on steam, she’s got something like twenty guns to our eight—and only two of ours work—and she’ll catch us by tomorrow or the next day, certain.”

I could see Niloch’s ship a little better now, a dark shadow hunkered low in the Stygian waters, its lanterns peering at us like eyes in the fog. I had hoped I’d burned the ugly, rattling bastard to ashes when I blew up his Gravejaw House, but hellish nobility are extremely hard to kill. And as I think I’ve mentioned, they’re also very serious about holding grudges. Apparently, the commissar had managed to get himself appointed to head up the Bobby Hunt. “Can we fight them?”

“If by fight you mean get cut to pieces, burned, and sunk, then yes, we’ll put up a fine fight. Ah, well. I always suspected I’d wind up at the bottom of the Styx someday.”

As if to underscore this cheery thought, the wind changed direction and our sails sagged. As I stared out across the dark expanse of river I could hear the hungry rumble of the Headless Widow’s engines.