"Wait, wait," blurted Sulla, raising his hands as if to grip the other figure by the shoulders but sliding them away from the touch at the last instant.
"Tell them I will put the shipment out. It's all safe, all safe. I'll go right now and start to make arrangements!"
He sprinted to the door; but as his fingers touched the wood, his body convulsed with a great shudder. Sulla looked back at his Luck and said, "A few days, a week perhaps - it shouldn't matter. But it does, doesn't it?"
Sulla's Luck smiled regretfully. "Well, my Lucius, he said. "I'll pass on your offer. Who knows?
Perhaps in time they might be willing to come to another arrangement with you, on the former terms." He shrugged.
Sulla moaned and rested his forehead in the crook of his elbow for a dozen heartbeats. Then he slid the lattice open and staggered across the reception court. He was muttering, "I m sure they'll be reasonable. After all...
Sulla's Luck closed the lattice again and walked back to the table. The filtered light of Paradise was a red as deep as pulsing anger. It would not have been sufficient to limn the writing on the bronze plate for human eyes - but anyway, Sulla's Luck knew it very Well.
They had never understood, the damned souls or the living - Dante as little as the rest. All hope abandon - because if you have no hope, you cannot be tortured. Only the possibility of release can make interminable pain interminably painful.
Sulla's Luck reached slowly toward the heap of white powder. The latticework through which the light seeped distorted his shadow, making it seem now that of a woman hunched within her shawl, now that of a bird with a great clacking bill.
He lifted a pinch of the powder.
Hope for success, thought Sulla's Luck. Hope for surcease, hope for something besides damnation to a place where he knew well he did not reign.
He snorted the powder of hope into one upturned nostril. Horns quivered on his shadow.
Where his eyes should have been were two glowing drops of hellfire.
SNOWBALLS IN HELL
Chris Morris
When his horse started dissolving under him, Alexander the Great was riding along the shore of a wine-dark sea.
Though the beach he cantered along was no longer the beach of Troy, it had been that, once.
Alexander had fought here then, with Achilles and Diomedes by his side. Or he thought he had.
He remembered it.
The horse under him was the noble Bucephahis, long lost and now found again.
For Bucephalus' sake, for the mighty heart beating under that black hide, for the mane that whipped now in his face and the soft sweetness of a kiss from that velvet muzzle, Alexander had left his new-found Achaean friends behind.
Friends were hard to come by in Hell. But Bucephalus, the war horse of Alexander's Earthly life, had been reunited with him and the choice between staying with the horse or returning to a higher hell had been no choice at all, So he'd stayed behind, here on what was once the battle plain of Ilion but remade itself anew, periodically. He'd stayed with Bucephalus, alone.
And now, on a canter to nowhere for no particular reason, Bucephalus was starting to leave him.
To dissolve. To decompose. To scream and become ectoplasmic and ... gone.
Alexander too was screaming, though he didn't know it. He was crying and this he knew. He couldn't see clearly but he could see-and feel-the horse between his thighs becoming dust and air and sand and...
Bright white light came from somewhere, burning away the sea mist and destroying everything in its path. Alexander twisted his fingers in what remained of Bucephalus' mane and yelled, "I love you Bucephalus. I'll never forget you. I'll not rest until we find each other again!"
By the time he'd howled the last words he was falling, unseated by a ghost horse who might never have been there. Falling forever. He didn't hit the ground. He fell and fell.
Trying to brace for a concussion of flesh and ground that would not come, his tears dried. Dried in the wind and the white light and the grief that emptied his soul. And still he fell.
He fell through white wind and soon he fell sideways. He opened his eyes and squinted into the light and noticed that he wasn't the only one falling: he saw others, shadows passing at a distance, dark dapples in the light. And then he realized, by the way his hair was whipping around his eyes, that he wasn't falling downward. He was falling up!
How can a man fall up? He couldn't understand it. He clenched his fists and brought them to his eyes. And there he found, wound among his fingers, long, midnight strands of Bucephalus' mane. He laughed a defiant laugh, clutching those strands to his face.
And fell some more, until at last he began to sense that he was falling downward. Through the white light he could See dark plateaus. He could see clouds below him. He could see lands far and wide, with rivers and forests.
Forests toward which he was falling at a terrifying rate. Doubtless, he told himself as he pinwheeled in the air, he would hit the ground and die instantly. Death, in Hell, meant the Trip: he would suffer, he would crash and crumple and shatter like faience; then he would awake in New Hell on the Undertaker's table, subject to the foul jokes of the Chief Mortician. And then he would be Reassigned.
Next to losing Bucephalus, it was a minor horror. He was Alexander the Great.
He was not afraid of Hell's bureaucracy, only of himself-of his capacity for love and his capacity for rage.
So as he fell ever more quickly toward a stand of trees among which wound a series of roads, he clutched the strands of Bucephalus' mane more tightly, and tied one end of the strands to his chiton's clasp, the other to his wrist.
No matter what happened to him, or where he woke, he would have that talisman of love and luck when he lived again. For Alexander, who had been separated from Bucephalus for millennia, those strands were all the luck and all the hope he needed.
Death was a mere inconvenience.
Or so he thought, until he began falling through a stand of pines. Every branch that broke under his weight stabbed him. Every bough that bent slapped him. Every trunk rebounded him like a pinball in that game the New Dead played. Every pine needle pierced him.
And then he began to wonder where he was dying: if you died in certain deeper Hells, like that of Troy, rumor had it you never found your way back to the Undertaker, You experienced nothingness. Forever. Or you didn't experience anything. Ever again.
Suddenly the pain of his fall became precious-it was experience. Alexander had stayed sane in Hell because he was Alexander-was always Alexander, would always be Alexander.
The idea of "not being" terrified him. What had happened to Bucephalus? He shook his head, falling with his eyes closed, and his skull hit a tree trunk.
Hard.
The last. thing he thought, before his body hit the ground in a marsh and a rush of reed and water, was that if Bucephalus was really gone forever, he must face it. And face a similar fate with courage.
But that much courage, Alexander the Great did not have. "No!" he screamed, at the top of his lungs, until those lungs filled up with marsh water and his battered body sank in the mud.
It wasn't easy, being the only volunteer angel in Hell, but Altos was doing the best job he could.
He'd been co-opted into the rebel camp, into the Dissident movement, by men of low degree for foul purpose - those who followed Che Guevara, those who took orders from a Pentagram faction headed by Tigellinus and Mithridates.
He'd come to the Dissidents for reasons that none of those who'd brought him even suspected, until it was too late. There had been an air strike called on (he Dissidents' camp by the Devil's Children. Altos had gone among the rebels to save whomever he could.