Happy Hour in Hell

thirty-seven: walking on water

HERE’S A little rule about warfare at sea: Avoid it.

Here’s a corollary pertaining to warfare against a ship full of angry demons, on a mythical river inhabited by monsters, and with no better hope, even if you win, than fighting your way across the rest of Hell afterward on the off chance that you might find your way out again, at which point your angry angelic bosses or any number of other interested parties will get on with the job of ripping your soul out of your body and sending it right back to Hell again: Avoid that even more strenuously.

But there I was, standing at the Bitch’s rail, watching just such a demonic ship bearing down on us, as it had been doing for hours.

In ordinary circumstances we’d have been all right, because we had the current with us and our ship was small and fast. Slavers had to be, not because slavery was illegal in Hell (not bloody likely) but because slaves were valuable cargo that other ships were only too happy to steal. But according to Riprash, Niloch’s ship was powered by four huge steam engines, so even if we could get through Styx Lock ahead of them, they would gain on us even faster when we reached the thicker, more resistant waters of the Phlegethon.

If we ran all night, Riprash said, risking going onto a rock and only-the-Highest-knew what else, and we managed to stay ahead of Niloch, we’d probably reach the lock in the earliest hours of the morning. But after that, it would be only a matter of time before he overtook us. Riprash and his crew were busy keeping us alive until then, coaxing every bit of speed out of the old slaver’s tub, but I had nothing to do but walk back and forth on the deck nursing a growing sense of disaster.

In less fucked-up circumstances it would have been interesting to watch the crew working together to keep the Bitch running ahead of our enemies. Many of them had the apelike look of Gob, which stood them in good stead as they swung through the shrouds even more nimbly than the most experienced human sailors. Others less suited for climbing looked as though they’d be most useful when it came time to fight, especially a pair of brothers named Retch and Rawny, who had razor-sharp talons on hands and feet and were covered all over with spiny plates. Still, if the enemy caught us, even those two were going to find it hard to do much more than outlive us by a few moments. The Headless Widow was closer now, and even in the dim red light reflected from Hell’s awesome ceiling, the only glow on this stretch of the oily river, it was plain that their ship was far larger than ours and their crew far more numerous.

It was my fault that Niloch was bearing down on the Bitch, my fault that when he caught up, he’d sink Riprash’s ship and take the survivors into slavery. It was up to me to help save them, or all this hopefulness about redemption was just noise.

Then, as I paced, I suddenly remembered what Riprash had said about throwing the owner of the pistols I was wearing overboard, and that gave me an idea—a crazy, hopeless one, but I wasn’t in a position to be picky—so I went to ask Walter about supplies we might have on board. I found my former co-worker standing at the starboard rail watching the Widow’s lights slowly grow closer.

“Riprash says Niloch’s the worst kind of demon,” said Walter quietly.

“There’s a kind that’s worse than the others?”

“He said Niloch’s the sort who wants to make a name for himself, but he’s basically mediocre. Mediocre—that’s my word, not Riprash’s. He said, ‘useless.’ He says it’s the ambitious, stupid ones who make the most trouble.”

“Not just here, either,” I said, thinking of Kephas. “Still can’t remember anything about what happened?”

Walker shrugged. He didn’t meet my eye. “Sorry. I do know you, though, Bobby. It took me awhile, but I remember you now. I think you treated me square.”

“We were friends,” I told him. “That’s how I always saw it. Do you remember anything else? The Compasses?”

He rubbed his wrinkled little face. “Not really. I mean, I know it was a place and that I used to go there. I sort of remember it was a place where people laughed and . . . sang?”

“Not so much singing as putting money in the jukebox and shouting along,” I said. “But, yeah. More or less.”

“I think . . . I think I remember Heaven, too.” He spoke slowly, as if wanting to be certain of what he said. “At least, that’s what it seems like. Beautiful, bright light. Someone talking to me. A sweet, sweet voice.”

“Yeah, that sounds like Heaven. But you can’t remember anything else?”

“No.” He was frustrated, almost tearful. “No, but it’s important. I know it’s important.”

I felt like his pain was my fault, too, but it had to be better for him to know he didn’t belong in Hell, didn’t it? It wouldn’t have been kind to leave him in ignorance. That’s what I tell myself, anyway. “Well, if you think of anything, let me know. Because something is definitely weird. You were attacked by the guy they sent after me, then . . . you just never came back. I expected they’d put you in a new body . . .” I broke off, having noticed something happening on the horizon, where The Headless Widow had grown taller as it approached, so that it now looked almost like Gravejaw House itself had taken to the river. “Is Niloch’s ship . . . on fire?” I stared, positive that I was seeing things. Certainly it was too convenient otherwise, for our enemy simply to catch fire. “Riprash!” I shouted. “Come here!”

When the ogre arrived, the cloud of smoke and fire around the Widow had spread out a good way on either side, and I truly began to believe that fate might have saved me from an extremely unpleasant end to my infernal vacation. “It’s fire, right? It’s burning?”

Riprash didn’t look like someone ready to celebrate. “It’s fire, right enough. But it’s not their boat burning. Fact, whatever it is, it’s coming toward us.”

“What? Is it a gun? Did they fire something at us?”

I never got an answer, at least not from Riprash, because the dark cloud full of fire was growing so fast that I couldn’t see Niloch’s ship any more. A moment later something shot over our heads, flaming like a tracer bullet. It hit the deck, bounced once in a shower of sparks, then smacked into the far gunwale. A nearby sailor threw a bucket of black Styx water on it.

“What is it?” asked Walter, but a moment later a dozen more whipped past us and we could see that they were birds, gray and plump and fast, and every single one of them on fire.

A couple struck the mizzen sail and started the fabric smoldering. A pair of simian deckhands scrambled up the lines to put it out, but even as they climbed several more birds struck the mizzen and the topsail. Another winged blaze came hurtling over the water toward us, bobbing crazily, and smacked right into Gob, catching in his hair and setting it alight. Riprash roared and grabbed the boy, then leaned out over the rail, stretching his huge arm to dunk the boy in the river and extinguish the flames.

“Niloch’s doing! He’s the Commissar of Wings and Claws,” Riprash shouted as he dropped soaking Gob to the deck. More birds flew past as if shot out of a gun, trailing flames, trying to fly even as their wings burned away. “Man the buckets, every helljack of you!” he bellowed. “They’re trying to set the sails alight, and if the sails burn, they’ll catch us before the next glass. Pass those buckets! Keep the water coming!”

I joined the madness, taking my place in a line, passing sloshing pails of stinking Styx water from the bilge up to the masts. The best climbers were kept busy putting out the fires wherever the hell-pigeons struck, but even so, the mizzen sail was gone and the topsail almost entirely aflame, and only heroic work by the crew kept it from spreading to the other sails.

The flock finally thinned, but without the topsail we were losing ground even more swiftly. I squatted down on the deck beside Walter and struggled to catch my breath before the next wave of flaming birds.

Something pale flew past me, rattling. Another pale shape struck the mainmast behind us and fell to the deck, thrashing and snapping. It was a flying fish, or at least part of one—an almost fleshless skeleton. But the fact that it was mostly bones and empty eye sockets didn’t keep it from trying to sink its teeth into everything it could reach before it died. Several more flew past, then suddenly a whole flock or school or whatever you call it seemed to tumble down on us. Several of the crew putting out fires were knocked out of the rigging as if they’d been hit by bullets. They fell to the deck—I could hear bones breaking—so I grabbed Walter and dragged him back toward Riprash’s cabin. Gob was already there, hunkered down in the doorway, watching with wide eyes as the swarm of mummified fish smacked into the sails and deck.

Then, from out of the distance, I heard The Headless Widow’s cannons fire, a deep roar like sequenced thunder. They were still too far away to reach us, but it was an announcement of sorts: the end was coming, whether sooner or later.

“I have an idea,” I shouted to Gob and Walter over the yelling and screaming of the crew, many of whom were barely clinging to the ropes overhead as they dodged the toothy horrors. I asked Gob, “Can you sew?”

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.

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 probably 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.