“Git,” she rumbled at the gin peddler. “This fine gennulman don’t want your swill. He wants a little of the good times, eh? Eh? Am I right?” She leered as she bounced her breasts in her ragged bodice. They looked like plastic bags of pale gravy and blue spaghetti. “Nothing like what I’ll give you for a spit, lordship. I’ll clean your gulleys and gutters, I will. Blow the ashes right out your chimney!” She hiked up her skirt to show me what was under the dress. If a hairless horse had as many legs as a spider, with a cruel parody of female genitalia at the juncture of each sagging, scarred pair of thighs, then . . . no, you don’t really need to know. It was all I could do not to vomit. “Oooh, lovely,” she said, reaching for my prick.
I suddenly realized I was naked. I mean, really realized. I turned and dove into the crowd, for the moment not caring what other horrors I was rubbing against.
“Asswipe! You won’t find any prettier between here and the Uppers,” she bawled after me, cantering awkwardly in place as the bodies of her fellow Hell-citizens pressed back around her. “What you think, that you’re one of the high boys? Go on and find out what they’d do to you, you stuck up little turdball!”
I had to keep moving, I now understood, because when you stopped, things started to crawl on you. So I pushed on through the crowds, through the filth and the howls and the unending horror-zoo, past things that cringed from me and things that snapped at me, past beggars by the dozens with raised hands like mutant starfish, begging, pleading, weeping tears of blood and other unpleasant liquids. Everybody was scarred. Everybody was crippled, and not in accidental ways—these were punishments. It should have become easier to take after a while, the constant flow of maimed creatures, the hopeless and the inhuman, but it didn’t, and wouldn’t for a long time. I picked up a large rock and carried it in my hand, just to have some kind of a weapon.
Still, as I fought my way through the crowd in search of a way out of this level, or at least a place where the shoving crowds weren’t so terrible, I saw that there were things happening here in the labyrinth of Abaddon that had nothing to do with me, or even with punishing people: makeshift shops with actual workers, taverns, houses, and other signs of civilization, however grotesque. I confess I was surprised. People actually lived here in Hell. They sold things, they struggled to be able to eat and sleep safely. But where were the punishments? Not the punishment of simply existing in all this hateful, overwhelming squalor, but the actual punishments?
Then it struck me, and of all the ugly things I had experienced since stepping off the Neronian Bridge, none hit me harder. This horror around me wasn’t what Hell was really like. Not by a long shot. Lameh had said something about the levels of Abaddon being in the upper parts of Hell, not up where the lords of Hell like Eligor and Prince Sitri made their homes, but not the deeps either. In levels far below us in the great darkness, in the worst of the boiling heat of which this was the merest balmy outskirt, where the souls I had heard on the bridge were made to scream those mind-freezing screams, that was where the real Hell lay. Horrible as this place was, an insult to every sense, a horror to every thought—still, by infernal standards I was in the pleasant suburbs. And if I were captured, I would never see anything this charming again.
At that moment I came very, very close to simply giving up.
Lameh’s mind-whisperings had helped me with some of the geography of Hell but hadn’t given me anything like a detailed idea of how it all fit together, let alone an actual map. In fact, I doubted there could be such a thing, outside of a few broad strokes, because just during the short time I’d been in Abaddon I’d seen a half-dozen passageways made and destroyed. The place grew and changed constantly, like a living organism, a coral reef or something, although the work was done by demons and damned. Between one lamp and the next, a road became two or was filled in; houses were built on top of other houses until they all collapsed, then more were built atop the rubble. Entire neighborhoods caught fire or were shaken down by the intermittent tremors, only to be rebuilt in different form for new inhabitants, often right on the still-screaming bodies of the injured. And they might keep shrieking that way forever, because death can’t release you if you’re already dead.
I had a couple of places I needed to go, but no idea of how to get to them, except that they were both somewhere above me in the great stack of infernal levels. And if you think it’s hard to get directions in a strange city, try Hell. Actually, no, don’t bother.
No map, no directions. How was I going to do what I had to do?
As it turned out, Abaddon had an answer for me.
I was standing in a sewage culvert at the outskirts of one of Abaddon’s maze of settlements, staring up at a depressingly familiar piece of outer wall when it happened. I was exhausted and frustrated, because I had just realized I’d checked out this area the previous day. In other words, I’d got lost again. It seemed I’d have to hike the whole circumference of the place to find a way out, which might take years just on this level.
Something brushed against me and lingered longer than it should have. I didn’t hesitate—I didn’t want to be attacked or solicited—so I swung my arm hard at whatever was touching me. I heard a grunt and something tumbled to the ground at my feet, felled far more easily than I would have expected.
I looked down and saw a very small shape huddled below me in the churned, excremental mud of the street, a naked creature not much larger than an organ grinder’s monkey, hard to separate from the muck underneath. Passersby were stepping on it as often as over it, some of them huge, some of them with hard hooves. I could hear the little thing squeaking, not like something crying but like something desperately trying to catch a breath, so I steeled myself, reached down, and yanked the little bundle up onto its feet. It was only as I turned away again, this small humane act completed, that I saw that the little whatever-it-was held my weapon-stone in his long-fingered hands. The little fucker had picked my pocket, and I didn’t even have a pocket.
I snatched back the stone, then pulled the thief into an eddy of the crowd where I could look him over. He had big, round eyes but hardly any nose, his limbs were shrunken and bent with what in the normal world I would have taken for the aftereffects of scurvy, and he was matted all over with pale hair. He was surprisingly strong, though—I had to keep a tight grip on him to keep him from squirming away. The wide-mouthed, primate face betrayed an intelligence that was enough like my own to make my borrowed heart sink inside my borrowed breast.
“You stole my rock,” I said.
He tried to look innocent, but succeeded only in looking more than ever like something that was going to pee on your rug as soon as you turned away. “Nuh,” he said. “Didn’t. Lemme go. Bilgebark’s calling.” His voice was high-pitched, like a child’s.
“Who’s that? Who’s Bilgebark?”
His dark eyes went even wider. He was astonished by my ignorance. “The minder, he is, the big hand, big man. Around Squitters Row, anywise. He’ll come after, I’m not back to the works by afters.” Something about the way he spoke made me even more certain he was a child. His eyes kept darting to either side, and although he’d quit fighting, his muscles were still tense in my grip. If he couldn’t convince me to let go of him, this kid was going to do something to get free, probably something violent, but he was going to try to talk his way out first. I liked that. “What’s your name?” I asked.
He slitted his eyes as if I’d blazed a flashlight in his face. “Don’t got one.”
“What do you do? Where do you live? Do you have a family?”
The eyes crept wider still at this, as though he was having trouble keeping command of himself in the face of such bizarre questions. “Don’t got one. Live at the works.” He licked his lips, then asked nervously, “You Murder?” He saw I didn’t understand. “Murder Seck?”