Happy Hour in Hell

twenty-nine: breath of heaven

CAZ WALKING away like that—well, it felt like a tornado had touched down in the middle of my chest, torn up and destroyed everything inside me, and then suddenly moved on. I could hear the damned and their jailers all around me, screaming with glee at the spectacle below, but all that horror was suddenly just noise. I was so shocked I could hardly think.

At last, my survival instincts kicked in. Obviously I couldn’t just cling to the facade of the colosseum all day, so I worked my way back to where I’d been and crawled over the rim and into the Circus. The customers below me didn’t notice because they were busy bellowing their pleasure as the last two crippled, bleeding almost-men confronted each other on the sand below, each with a long dagger in his teeth, neither able to crawl the rest of the distance to victory without disposing of his rival. The spectators were also throwing rocks and other heavy things down at the two struggling figures, either trying to help the one they’d bet on or just wanting to see a little more suffering.

I slumped down on a bench and let the hot stink of the place wash over me. I was beginning to feel like I belonged there, just another self-pitying loser in the Big Basement. I’d blown it, and I didn’t even know how. My only chance to see Caz alone, and she’d turned her back on me. She’d even promised Eligor would destroy me if I didn’t leave her alone—I mean, talk about rubbing my nose in it . . . !

It hit me then, the obvious thing I’d missed. After I thought about it for a few seconds, I rose and made my way back up to the top row. Down below, one of the contestants had managed to slit the other’s throat, and was crawling away as his victim writhed on a spreading expanse of red sand. I could feel the excitement of the spectators rise even higher. They were like sharks—if there was blood, they were interested.

I sat down a couple of feet from where Caz had stood. “Go away,” she’d said at least twice, but she never moved closer to her guards, several yards away, and she’d barely looked up. Why would she keep her back to a potential problem? Why wouldn’t she at least raise her voice to get the guards’ attention? Because she knew it was me, and she knew I was quite capable of doing something this stupid. Maybe she was trying to protect me from my own eagerness. Had I really expected her to have a joyous reunion with me out here in front of all of Hell, with Eligor only a few dozen rows down? Caz was too smart for that.

While pretending to watch the last Lykaion survivor crawling toward the finish, I looked around carefully in case she had dropped a note or a key, anything to tell me what we should do next, but saw only the usual filth. I even got down on my hands and knees where she’d been and searched in every crack of the ancient stone, but there was nothing to find, nothing hidden or discarded.

Despair washed over me again. For a moment, I’d been so certain that she’d been telling me to be more careful, that she needed more privacy, or time, or something, but now I began to think I’d been right in the first place: She’d either forgotten me or didn’t want to see me. After all I’d been through to get here, I was fucked, and there just wasn’t any other way to spin it.

Then I spotted it. It wasn’t easy, because it was almost the same color as the stone—a long thread only a little brighter than the great blocks of lava in the wall—snagged on an edge about waist-high. I reached out and lifted it gently with my finger. It was very fine thread, something that would have been expensive even on Earth, I guessed, but much more so here in Hell. It was almost the same length on either side of the snag, as though someone had held it by each end and draped it carefully in place. But if Caz had done it, what did it mean?

Of course Caz had done it. This was the woman who had managed to steal Eligor’s angel feather, and to sleight-of-hand her locket into my coat right under the Grand Duke of Hell’s pointy nose. She’d left the thread for me. She wanted me to use it to find her. I refused to believe anything else.

Another roar came from below. The seemingly defeated contestant with the slashed throat had caught his rival from behind, sunk his teeth into the poor bastard’s leg, and ripped out his hamstring; he might have lost the race but he was going to make certain his rival didn’t win either. The spectators, like most Hell-dwellers, were big fans of fucking up the other guy’s chances. They responded with cheers of approval as the two bloody bodies wriggled more and more slowly before coming to a halt at last, only a few yards from the finish. A squadron of large Murderers Sect demons with no-shit pitchforks was marching toward them, and I doubted either of the contestants was being retired to stud.

I didn’t bother to watch the very end. I was already on my way down the stairs, headed for the Night Market.

Saad the fence lifted the cracked lens he wore on a cord around his neck and squinted an eye. He held the thread up to get as much light on it as possible and examined it from several different angles, his pink spider legs tilting it up and down. Then he dropped it back into my hand.

“One handful,” he said. “Take it or leave it.”

“I don’t want to sell it, I want to know what it is—where it’s from!”

Saad licked his cracked lips with a tongue like a black garter snake. “I know. Cost you one handful to find out.” He gave me a harshly amused look. “You don’t think I tell you for free, do you? Hah! I don’t shit on someone for free.”

I still had quite a bit of Vera’s money, so the cost itself wasn’t an issue, but I didn’t want anyone around here to know I was comparatively wealthy, so I haggled and fought with Saad until he was waggling most of his arms in fury, and I got it down to four spit. Trust me, in Hell, fighting for every penny is just common sense, like hanging your food so the bears don’t come into your camp at night. Actually, it’s almost exactly like that, except bears are easier to negotiate with than whoever’s after your money in Hell.

My iron spits finally in Saad’s cash box, he directed me to a silk merchant named Han Fei out at the far end of the Night Market. I learned a few interesting things from that unpleasant gentleman, who imported the incredibly expensive silk from down on the Phlegethon levels. It was so expensive because it was actually made from the silk of real silkworms, or at least the kind of silkworms that could grow in Hell, apparently. I found out later that what they called “silkworms” in Hell was very much the same as what they called “slaves,” “prisoners,” and “the usual suspects”—the shiny threads were derived somehow from the torture of prisoners who had apparently been reborn in Hell as something that could be farmed for thread to keep the most wealthy of the hell-lords beautifully clothed.

I watched Han Fei eat a nine-course meal as he lectured me about infernal silk and the infernal economy. By the time he finished his dessert of honeyed eyes, I was exhausted. Most of the night was gone, and although I now had a list of a half-dozen or more places that traded in these most expensive fabrics, I knew it was too late to start working through them. I trudged back to the inn by the lagoon, to my small but still sweaty and uncomfortable bed, and did my best to sleep.

I guess it was irony, but for once I didn’t dream of Caz at all.

Within an hour of setting out the next day, soon after the first beacon had been lit, I eliminated half the places Han Fei had mentioned. They were all huge establishments, warehouses, really, dealing not just in silk but in exotic skins and all manner of other objects which would eventually wind up clothing the leading lights of Hell. It was pretty clear that if Caz had wanted to send me to one of these warehouses, she hadn’t given me enough information to take the next step. Like most places in Hell, the cloth merchants kept their records in their heads, and nobody was going to tell a stranger all the places they sold their fabrics, not even for a bribe.

I had a little more luck in one of the smaller shops, where a bedraggled old woman-thing with a face like a bunch of parsnips stapled together and fingers like dead twigs told me my sample was “the real thing,” the dye being something that nobody used anymore except for Chateau Machecoul, one of the most exclusive clothing stores in Pandaemonium. She told me this for free, which made me suspicious, but she also took a look at my clothes and declared I’d never be allowed in looking like such a gross peasant, which made me feel a little better. If someone isn’t saying something unpleasant to you in Hell, you should be checking to see if they’ve stuck a knife in your back.

I asked her to recommend a few things for me that might make a visit to Machecoul more successful. The prospect of extorting some money from me brightened her up considerably, and she spent the good part of an hour rigging me an outfit that wouldn’t have drawn attention in a community theater production of The Pirates of Penzance. She assured me that I looked like a leader of Pandaemoniac fashion, and as I examined my reflection in a polished sheet of metal I could almost agree. Yet another reason for me to get out of Hell as quickly as possible.

I knew better than just to walk up to a place like Chateau Machecoul. In Hell, going anywhere on your own little hooves is like announcing that you’re poor as dirt and eligible to be eaten by anything higher up the food chain, so I hired a cab, a sort of huffing steam crab on huge spiked wheels, and had it drop me off on the corner of Torquemada Street and Ranavalona Avenue in the Tumbrel District, a wealthy neighborhood where the mistresses and catamites of powerful demons did their shopping. I could believe that, since most of the demons and damned I saw there were either ridiculously beautiful in some very extreme ways, or deformed in some specifically sexual manner.

As I watched Hell’s beautiful people go past in ones, twos, and threes, I suddenly wondered whether Caz’s oh-so-attractive appearance wasn’t her own choice but rather something Eligor had insisted on. Certainly there was a fad among some of Hell’s highest to look very human. I’d seen it in Vera’s crowd, and I was seeing it even more clearly here, as Pandaemonium’s best and brightest window-shopped and held little tete-a-tetes at the equivalent of chic little restaurants. I say “equivalent” because, believe me, even a starving beggar on Earth wouldn’t want to eat the swill they served in those places. Doesn’t matter how rich you are, you can’t make anything taste good in Hell because nothing tastes good in Hell. It’s that simple. It may look like fine wine and nouvelle cuisine, but it tastes like vinegar and ashes. The only things that didn’t actively taste foul were the ever-present asphodel flowers, the food of the dead, and they were as bland as poi.

Chateau Machecoul looked no different from the outside than the small, expensive shops on either side of it, a jewelers and some kind of gentleman’s clothiers that seemed to specialize in sharp and pointy outfits that would have made any activity more intimate than waving across a room painful or actively dangerous. The ancient, mud brick buildings were decorated with awnings, window boxes, and swags of lights—electric, of course, because in Pandaemonium, electricity was a sign of wealth. I’m sure generating it involved some kind of hideous torture.

The door of the shop was locked. I rapped on it, and a moment later it swung open, but there was no one on the other side.

Fabric was everywhere inside the shop, hanging in huge sheets like a thousand overlapping tapestries and rolled in bolts in the wall alcoves, an almost claustrophobic array of different kinds of cloth. Headless dressmaker’s dummies—at least that’s what I hoped they were—stood all around me, but I didn’t see any customers, dressmakers, or salesdemons.

“Is anyone here?” I walked deeper into the store, my hand straying toward the pocket where I kept my Night Market knife. It was beginning to smell more like a trap by the second, like one of those Mafia things where the guy looks up from his cannelloni and realizes all the other customers have walked out. When a hand lightly touched me on my shoulder I turned around with the knife out, ready to cut the shit out of whoever had snuck up on me. Except, of course, I couldn’t. Because it was her.

She wasn’t as certain, of course—I didn’t look quite the same as the last time she’d seen me on Earth—but her eyes stayed on mine and she didn’t flinch. “Bobby . . . ?”

I could hardly speak. “Caz.”

“You idiot!” And then she hit me. Right across the chops. Knocked me spinning, too. Every time I saw that woman I wound up getting the crap punched out of me. Believe me, that’s not my idea of a perfect relationship.

“Ow! What the hell are you doing?” I said, pinching my nose shut to keep the blood off of my new clothes, but a moment later she was pressed against me and soon I was smearing my blood on both of us. Everything felt unreal. After so long . . . !

“Why are you always hitting me?” I murmured, my lips pressed so hard against hers that it probably sounded like Pig Latin.

“You shouldn’t have come! You shouldn’t!” She pulled her face back. Tears had started down her cheeks and frozen solid, little sparkling bits of white like irregular sequins. “You’ll get yourself killed, Bobby. You can’t do anything for me, so go home before he catches you.” But no matter what she might have been saying, she was holding on tightly. I already had her bodice open and had yanked it down so that I could reach her nipples, which stuck out like little pointing fingers. If I could have got both of them in my mouth at the same time I would have, but I had to take turns.

“No,” she moaned, but she was yanking up my shirt even as I suckled at her, grabbing the skin of my back as though she would somehow pull me into her, through her, like a doorway, and although she was still angry with me, still crying in frustration and fear, she never once pushed me away. Her hunger was as great as mine. As for me, seeing my strange, gray demon hands on her white skin suddenly made me feel as though I was staining her somehow, as though my foreign body was some kind of violation, an unfaithfulness, but Caz didn’t seem to care. After a few heartbeats I didn’t either. This was the body my soul was wearing, after all, and my soul didn’t care about anything except Casimira, Countess of Cold Hands. This was my real body now, and after the moment of strangeness had passed, it had never felt more that way.

We fell to the carpeted floor, scattering clothing, half-dressed as we wrestled, our only goal to obliterate ourselves in each other. For that moment, everything I’d been through, everything that still stood before me—treachery, torment, death—they all fell away. I didn’t even stop to consider that making love in one of Hell’s most famous boutiques wasn’t exactly discreet, because at that moment nothing existed but the two of us, separated for so long but never truly apart, still burning for each other. It doesn’t make sense in Hell or on Earth, but if you’ve been there, you know. We were making a cathedral of sweat and skin and stifled cries in the worst place that ever was, and nobody was in it but us.

We gave up on the clothes at some point, having removed enough of them that I could climb on top of her and sink myself to the root. My demon body, I was discovering, reacted pretty much like my earthly one. I guess the scientists are right: most of sex is in the mind.

Caz gasped and stiffened, her nails driving into my thickened hide like the tips of knives, ten stabs at once, but it only made me crazier, more animal. I rubbed my face against hers, taking in her smells in insane gulps even as she wrapped her thighs around me, urging me past the chilly bite of her petals to her deep inner heat. She groaned. So did I. We were pushing against each other so violently, striving for some impossible completeness of connection, that we kept bumping into things on the floor, legs of tables, dressmaker’s dummies, knocking things over until we must have looked a lot like those two damned souls in the Lykaion race, trying to destroy each other in the bloody sand of the Circus Commodus.

At last I paused, panting, dripping sweat and blood, still too exalted and too stupefied to come. Caz pushed me onto my back and then slid her body over me, pushing her pussy in my face as she licked me and smacked at me with her clawed fingers, then she climbed back onto my cock to ride me as though I were a dying horse, pulling everything out of me she could. When my orgasm finally burst out of me it felt like a heart attack. I shouted and pulled her against me as tightly as I could, and this seemed to squeeze her into climax as well. She clenched my ribs between her knees and rode harder and harder until her ragged breathing rose to a sustained growl of desperate and only coincidentally pleasurable release, then she rolled off me and lay like a dead thing. I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. I could barely breathe, but what air I could draw in smelled like Caz. She might be a woman who had been damned since before Columbus sailed, but she was the woman I had crossed Hell to find: to me, it was the true breath of Heaven.

At last her own panting slowed, calmed. She reached out a hand, nudged my arm with it. For a moment I didn’t know what to do, then I realized she wanted me to hold it.

We lay there, both of us still breathing very hard, hand in hand in a pile of Hell’s finest couture.

“Well,” she said at last. “We’re really fucked this time, Dollar. I hope you’re happy.”

“Strangely, yes,” I said. Of course we would both suffer terribly when we were caught. Dying would be the luckiest possible outcome, but neither of us were that lucky. “Yes, I am.”