Happy Hour in Hell

twenty-eight: the drowned girl

HERE’S A tip. If you’re a Mormon missionary or a door-to-door salesman, don’t waste your time and outer skin visiting Flesh Horse. My forged documents got me more attention than I would have liked, but they also got me inside the tower and into an appointment with Eligor’s Chief of Security. The grand duke’s previous head of security, my old friend Howlingfell, had been eaten by a large supernatural monstrosity that was supposed to eat me instead—something I can honestly say I enjoyed a great deal. The new chief, a hideous thing named Snaghorn, resembled a bloody, skinned grizzly bear with snail-stalks for eyes. He’d never seen me before, which doesn’t mean he heartily invited me in, of course: Snaghorn spent a good fifteen minutes just sniffing me. I’m sure he was just doing his job, but he seemed to do it for a very long time. A very, very long time. But at last Snaghorn seemed satisfied. Instead of biting any parts off me, he touched a curving black claw to my forehead. It felt like I’d been branded, and in a way, I had: he’d given me his mark, which meant limited permission to move through the lower levels of the house. Not by myself, of course, and not freely. I had an appointment with someone Snaghorn curtly referred to as “the drowned girl.”

Fun, fun, fun, any way you sliced it. It’s a wonder more people don’t make Hell a holiday destination.

Considering we were in a building that looked from the outside like some kind of giant tubeworm had excreted it, and from the inside like a bad acid trip version of a Renaissance tower, the drowned girl’s office was surprisingly ordinary. She sat at an ancient wooden desk, the old-fashioned kind called a “secretary,” with lots of pigeonholes to stash things and a large framed mirror sitting front and central in the middle of the desk surface. The windows of the quiet, dark room looked out over a backwater of the Phlegethon called the Bay of Tophet. The whole expanse of river seethed, flames floating on the black boil and sending curls of steam into the red-lit air; the view out the window seemed like a piece of theatrical scenery. The drowned girl herself looked pretty much the way you’d guess. Although swollen in places, she was still slender, the effect heightened by the lank, dripping hair that hung down to the shoulders of her wet, vaguely medieval-looking dress. Her skin was exactly the kind of blue-white ghastly and puffy-at-the-edges you’d expect. Her pale, bleached-out eyes watched me intelligently (if a bit resentfully), but every now and then they just rolled up behind her lids and stayed that way for a while, which left me staring at a very realistic corpse in an office chair.

“I am Marmora.” She sounded like she still had some water in her lungs. “And you are apparently Pseudolus of Prespa,” she continued, reading the sheet of vellum I’d handed her. (I’d decided “Snakestaff” had pissed off too many people for me to walk into Eligor’s and use that name again.) “What is your business with the Grand Duke Eligor?”

Cutting off the duke’s Grand Nuts, I wanted to say, or anything similar that would express my feelings about the huge amount of bullshit I owed him for, not least of which was stealing back the girlfriend I’d stolen from him. “It’s regarding another member of my sect, the late Prosecutor Grasswax,” is what I said instead. “The Liars Sect has sent me here.” They hadn’t, of course, but that was what my forged documents showed. “I just want to ask him a few questions about Grasswax.”

“That will not happen.” Her sour smile was made a little creepier by the stream of liquid that dribbled from her lower lip. “His Grand Ducal Highness is far too busy to see someone like you.”

“I understand.” I hadn’t expected to get an audience, and in fact I didn’t want one, I just wanted a chance to get in and explore. “Who else could I talk to?”

“Nobody.” She pushed the vellum back to me, her fingers so soft, damp, and swollen that they left little shreds of skin on the document. “Grasswax was never in the grand duke’s employ.”

“But he came here often. And I’ve been told he performed some, well, informal tasks for Grand Duke Eligor—”

“That doesn’t matter. His Grand Ducal Highness will not see you, and nobody else here can tell you anything about our master’s . . . informal arrangements. I suggest you take your inquiries elsewhere.” She stared at me for a long moment, a strangely intimate moment, although it was hard to look back into those cloudy, ruined eyes. “I would prefer not to have to call Snaghorn and his guards to show you out, but I will if I must.” She said it almost as if she truly meant it, which was kind of her, but it was still bad news. I’d hoped to get farther and stay longer, maybe even work up an idea of where Caz was being held.

I stood there clutching my forged documents, wondering what to do next. All I’d come up with was either asking for a public restroom or faking a seizure when I heard a harshly musical tone like a long icicle cracking. Marmora turned her bleary stare to the mirror on the desk. “Yes, Countess?”

Needless to say, I was suddenly pulled as tight as a guitar string. I stepped back from the desk and wandered a short distance away, as though respectfully giving Marmora her privacy, but I was really just trying to find an angle where I could see the front of the mirror.

It was her in the glass, her amazing face, right there in front of me. I couldn’t hear anything she was saying, although the drowned girl obviously could, but that didn’t matter. It was her, Caz, and after all this time she was actually within reach. All I’d have to do would be to interrupt Marmora, and I would be speaking directly to the woman I loved. I wasn’t going to do anything that stupid, of course, but I wanted to, I really did. There she was, the same beautiful, terrifying vision I’d first met when she appeared at the Edward Walker death scene, blood-red eyes and all. But Caz looked pale and tired now, oh so tired, and even from where I stood, I could see how much effort it was taking her to carry on this domestic conversation with Marmora. God, I wanted her. I wanted nothing but to sneak away from the drowned girl and try to find her, but I knew that would be suicide of an extremely certain kind.

“Yes, Countess, of course I’ll arrange that,” Marmora said. “When would you like to go? First night of the Wolf? I’ll arrange it. How big is that party?” I watched Caz speaking and wondered where in this vast tower complex she was right now. It was agonizing. Could I just sneak out and find her? Take her with me right now? Was I making things too difficult?

“Do you want to be on the Leopold Square side of the Circus?” Marmora asked. There was an odd tone to her voice, as if she was dealing with Caz in the hell-minion version of arm’s-length. Did she dislike the Countess of Cold Hands, or was something more complicated going on? And why should I care anyway? “Right, then, the Leopold Square end,” the drowned girl said. “Very good, my lady.”

Caz’s face vanished from the mirror. I thanked the drowned girl for helping me. Marmora gave me a strange look that reminded me “thank you” was not commonly heard in Hell.

“You should leave these matters alone and go back to the lower levels, Lord Pseudolus,” she said as I walked out. “You will be a mouse to the cats of Pandaemonium.”

I think she was being nice.

As soon as the dripping secretary had said “Circus,” I was pretty certain I knew where Caz would be going on the first night of the Festival of the Wolf, only a couple of hellish days away. Wolf was the closest thing to a holiday they had in Hell, a great orgy of public bloodletting and even worse-than-usual behavior. The Circus had to be the Circus of Commodus, Pandaemonium’s version of Madison Square Garden or Wembley Stadium. It might be my only chance to talk to Caz outside of Flesh Horse, which might mean it was also my last chance to carry her off. (Yes, even at this late date I confess I was still considering the thing in romantic terms like that, despite the fact that Caz was at least as strong as me and knew Hell a lot better than I ever would. Or at least a lot better than I hoped I ever would.) So, I now needed to change tactics. Just slip out the back, Jack. Make a new plan, Stan.

I remember stuff like that at the weirdest times.

Dis Pater Square is the biggest public space in Pandaemonium, the heart of Hell’s capital city. But just as the center of Paris starts at Notre Dame and stretches along the Champs Elysees to the Arc de Triomphe, so the center of Hell stretched all the way along the Via Dolorosa, the wide, grim avenue where triumphant demon-generals marched. The Circus, otherwise known as the Amphitheater of Commodus, was at the end of the Via Dolorosa, next to Leopold Square. Commodus was one of the worst of the Roman emperors, a murderous psychopath in the vein of Caligula and Nero, but unlike Nero, Commodus had never tried to cheat Hell. In fact, Commodus had a major landmark in Hell named after him instead of a forgotten bridge, so my guess was that Eligor and Caym and the boys weren’t making Emperor Commodus sing opera in front of heckling crowds, either.

It cost two spits to travel by ferry across the steaming expanse of the Bay of Tophet, but it was much faster than walking, and I didn’t want to jam myself into one of the lurching, packed trains. I reached the landing at Leopold Square before the second beacon had even been lit, leaving me the infernal afternoon to reconnoiter. The amphitheater was closed, but a bribe to a guard—who looked like someone had tried to make walrus jerky and failed—got me inside, then a wearying hike up stony steps got me to the top to look around.

Commodus’ amphitheater looked a lot like the famous colosseum in Rome, except longer and about five times bigger. I’m pretty sure you could pack a few hundred thousand people into it, or what passed for people down here. A track extended around the entire length, but there was a separate space at the middle, clearly meant for something like gladiator fights. The sands of the track and the arena were rusty with dried blood.

Down in the lower part of the stands near the center of the amphitheater, a large section was sheltered by roofs of stretched skin, like giant albino pterodactyl wings. Since there was no sun in Hell, I was pretty certain the roof was for privacy for Hell’s most important, and perhaps to protect them from the missiles and saliva of the braver or at least crazier of the less fortunate above and behind them.

I wandered around long enough to get a feeling for the Circus, paying close attention to exits, hiding places, and good and bad spots for making a desperate last stand. Then I sloped back to my room at the Ostrich to rest and think. Neither of those came easy. Every time I started to get a little focus, I would see Caz’s wan face again in that mirror and my thoughts would be scattered like bowling pins. I had never dreamed it was possible to want something or someone so much, and the fact that I had almost no chance of getting her just made me more obsessive. I fell asleep and dreamed of her, of course. In the dream she kept telling me to forget her, to turn away and go back, but even in my dream I couldn’t give her up, and so I followed her into endless shadow.

What went on at the Amphitheater of Commodus on the first day of Wolf? Well, it was pretty much exactly what you’d expect during a holiday in Hell in front of a quarter of a million gathered demons and damned souls, and all of it was ugly, ugly, ugly.

The holiday festivities began with the ritual slaughter and dismemberment of dozens of types of animals and damned souls, the kind of fun that would have been familiar at a real Roman colosseum, except neither the animals nor the damned could die. That didn’t stop horrendous, bloody things from happening, and in many ways it was worse to see creatures suffering that badly and knowing that even death wouldn’t end their pain. Then the races began, leading up to the big one, the Lykaion Rally, which drew most of the betting action. The track around the outside length of the amphitheater had been turned into an obstacle course with every manner of hard, hot, and sharp object you can imagine, then a gang of a hundred or so naked sinners were set loose at the same time to make their way once around the track, probably about two or three miles long. They had to make this circuit past the “ordinary” obstacles—pits of flaming oil, forests of barbed wire, and what looked like minefields—but also dozens and dozens of armed demons and ferocious beasts.

Other than the very strong possibility that this was a race nobody was going to win, the first thing I noticed was how battered all the runners-slash-victims looked, many as stooped and crooked as Richard the Third, some with limbs clearly different lengths or with huge unhealed wounds, clumsily stitched. When the race began, and the first of them lost limbs to the traps and wild beasts and the armed demons, the reasons became clear: Since they couldn’t die, when they became immobilized, they were dragged off the track along with whatever limbs and other body parts happened to be lying round. If the parts were theirs, so much the better, but they were crudely attached regardless, and then the damned’s literally hellish ability to heal reconnected those limbs, no matter whose they had been.

Anyway, the race was as ghastly as you’d guess, and the crowd loved it. The fans were particularly thrilled when the temporary leader ran onto the tusks of a skeletal mastodon and was flung to the sand, stamped into something that looked like a strawberry fruit roll-up, and then hoisted on the skeletal trunk and waved like a battle flag by the triumphant beast.

I took advantage of this excitement to make my way down from the cheap seats toward the winglike awnings that marked where the nobles (including Caz, I hoped) were sitting. I bought a sack of some horrible stuff from a vendor—I think they were paper cones full of bubbling, salted slugs—just to look like I had a reason to be there, then casually made my way down the stairs to the aisle behind the covered section.

My heart started to beat very quickly when I saw a flash of silvery-golden hair in the midst of all that shadow. It was Caz, but she was sitting next to Grand Duke Eligor, and much as I wanted to run up behind him and give him the old Welcome-to-the-Theater-Mister-Lincoln, I didn’t have a single weapon that would do more than annoy him, not to mention all his guards and ugly, powerful friends.

Two of the race’s leaders were now tearing each other’s faces off with their bare fingers, something that had the folks in the enclosure whooping and calling for more firewater, but I couldn’t look away from Caz. She leaned slightly toward her captor and said something. He gave her a quick, contemptuous look, then nodded at someone. Two big, gray-skinned fellows got up to escort her. I recognized them—oh, yes, I most certainly did. It was my old pals Candy and Cinnamon, her former bodyguards, but now just her guards, I felt pretty sure.

I watched that beautiful, somber face go past me, only yards away, her bearing slow and dignified, the two guards so close that they were nearly pinning her elbows. She climbed up the stairs toward the top of the amphitheater and for long moments I couldn’t understand what she was doing. But when she got to the top, Caz merely stopped along the wall and turned her back on the amphitheater, staring out across Pandaemonium as though pretending she was somewhere else. The air must have stunk just as badly up there as it did anywhere else in the city, but I guessed she still preferred it to the air next to Eligor.

Candy and Cinnamon stared at her in irritation for a moment, then moved a short distance away so they could watch the action below, but they were still keeping a close eye on her. She was definitely a prisoner, and probably had been the whole time I was back in the safe and comfortable real world, trying to decide whether I should come after her. I wasn’t liking myself much just then.

I moved farther along, then climbed up an aisle so I was also in the topmost tier, although with hundreds of people between us. Then, when one of the racers below fell into a pool of flaming oil but continued his race as a shrieking torch—which the audience just loved—I snuck a quick glance over the edge of the amphitheater.

I was in luck. There were harnesses for banners or perhaps some kind of windbreak along the outside, and a stone track where workers could stand below the outside rim, putting these harnesses up or down. I waited until the burning runner was being extinguished by a laughing giant with a club, which brought a large part of the audience to its feet, yelping in glee, then I slipped over the rim of the amphitheater and onto the ledge. It turned out to be a great deal narrower and less sturdy than it had looked.

I made my way along the stone track by sheer strength of fingers and toes until I had reached the approximate spot where Caz had been standing, her guards hopefully still another ten or fifteen yards farther away, then pulled myself up carefully. I had to take my feet off the ledge and use finger-holds, and it was a long way down. Still, when I popped my head up, there she was, her white-gold hair shining red, reflecting the light of the wall beacons.

I slipped back down again, out of sight. “Caz!” I said as loudly as I dared. “Countess!”

Nothing came back to me. I raised myself to the top again, hanging by my aching fingers. “Countess! Caz!” I hissed.

She turned, looked quickly in my direction, than looked away again just as fast. Candy and Cinnamon were still talking to each other, not even watching her. “Whoever you are,” she said with quiet urgency, “go away. You can’t imagine how bad . . .”

“Oh, yes, I can,” I said. I edged a little closer so I could keep my voice low. My fingers were really beginning to hurt. “Because I’ve been through it. He already sent that thing with the horns after me, remember?”

I saw her face swivel toward me again, sudden and pale as the moon appearing from behind trees, but only for an instant. “Go away,” she said, or at least I thought so. I could barely hear her over the crowd.

“Have you forgotten me already, Caz?” I was desperate to get back onto the ledge because my fingers felt like they were caught in a giant mousetrap, but it was her, it was her and she was talking to me. “Your locket saved me. I never got to tell you. It saved me.”

She went still as stone. For long moments I thought something had happened to her, that her soul had flown right out of her body. When she did speak, she still kept her face turned away.

“I don’t know who you are, but if you say another word I’ll call the guards, and then Grand Duke Eligor will peel your skin off and carve your bones into toothpicks. Do you understand? Leave me alone.” She started back down the stairs. Clearly irritated to have to move again, Candy and Cinnamon fell in behind her, a wall of nasty gray muscle. I could only hang helplessly against the amphitheater stones like a dying lizard as she left.