One last dizzy thought as I stumbled across the main concourse through a crush of Red Citizens as thick as anything I’d found in Abaddon: So was this the level of technology in Pandaemonium? Why? Why did this place look like a fairly modern railway station while down in Abaddon even the comparatively well-off were living like medieval peasants?
Stuff like that tends to snag my interest, but I couldn’t get distracted. I was woozy, exhausted, and sick, and if I didn’t find the way out I’d attract notice from the armored Purified, who seemed to have little else to do but to stare out their eyeslits at everything and everyone that passed. I found a huge stairway that, in my condition, might as well have been Mt. Everest, but it seemed to lead up toward an area of greater light, or perhaps an even bigger concourse, so I tightened the rag around my wrist again and started up.
It took me what felt like half an hour or more to climb those hundreds of steps. I was pushed and bumped the whole way by flocks of grotesque commuters who shoved me whenever I got in their way, but at last I reached another lobby. It was smaller than the great concourse downstairs, but its monstrously tall and narrow windows glowed with bright red light, and I could see a door that looked open to the outside.
As the uncaring, often actively hostile crowd jostled me out of the terminus and into what I realized must be Dis Pater Square, I saw the heart of the great infernal city for the first time. Pandaemonium was built from what looked like only two kinds of stone, great blocks of volcanic black and something more translucent, almost like quartz, that glowed with a fiery scarlet light. The radiance from the great buildings in its center made the whole metropolis seem to burn like a coal. Add the surrounding black city walls and, from a distance, Pandaemonium looked like a pile of embers burning forever in the darkness. The Red City. It wasn’t that different from other Hell cities I’d seen, just bigger and more so. The sky above my head was a tangle: dozens upon dozens of skyscraper towers loomed crookedly against the darkness, linked to each other by an array of fragile bridges, as if someone had stuck a bunch of giant pickup sticks in the ground, point down, and then dumped another pile right on top to let them settle where they would. Just looking up at this helter-skelter made me lightheaded without taking away a single throb from my wounded arm.
Suddenly I realized I was no longer standing but lying on the ground in front of the Terminus. I had fallen but didn’t know when or how long I’d been sprawled there. I climbed back onto my feet and staggered forward again, but the exhausting climb from the lifter had almost ruined me. I had to find safety, but where? I dimly recalled Lameh mentioning a Red City safe house where Snakestaff could hide in an emergency, but my blood-starved brain couldn’t summon it up. If only Lameh were still in my demon-head like she’d been in my Bobby-head . . . but I’d left her behind along with my world, hope, and sanity.
Where should I go? I was a sick animal, and I needed to get to ground and lick my wounds, but there were more than a few problems to solve first.
Problem number one: I was in Hell. I had no money, and there was literally no such thing as a free ride here. Even if I could remember where the safe house was, I had no idea how far away it was, though it was likely to be outside the center of the city, and I was so weak I’d barely made it out of the station. I stared blearily at vehicles speeding past me along the narrow streets, the cars of the wealthy, exhaust-belching, low, and slick as snakes. I saw fancy coaches, some drawn by huge rhinolike creatures and others towed by strings of shrieking, beakless birds. I saw jitneys pedaled by near-skeletons and big cargo wagons pulled by headless slaves, but I didn’t see a single thing that was going to carry me without charge, and I was pretty certain that if I didn’t rest I wouldn’t last much longer without fainting again.
I spotted a food-peddler’s rickety wagon on the far side of the street, loaded with steaming vats. The owner had a jackal’s face and the legs of an anorexic spider, but he seemed the least likely candidate to turn me over to the Purified. All I could think of was climbing into his cart to hide and sleep while he was looking the other way. Everything was darkening in front of my eyes, and a very enticing heaviness was sweeping over me. Bleeding out, it’s called, and the idea of “out” was definitely there: I could feel myself diminishing, like something swirled away down a drain. I took a step into the road—no curbs in Hell—and found it was difficult but not impossible to walk. My vision had lost focus, but I could dimly see the shape of the wagon, so I took another step and another. Then something hit me.
I can’t really tell you much about what it was, or at least I couldn’t at the time, just something big and loud that was suddenly on top of me. Then I was rolling, or flying, spinning across one of the main streets of Pandaemonium, and it was black and white and red all over, just like in the old joke. Rolling, bumping, then another, smaller impact. A feeling like the entire stony sky of Hell had fallen on me, then blackness rushed in.
The last thing I heard, as though spoken into a tin can down the longest, shakiest string any child had ever strung from a tree house, was a surprisingly sweet, feminine voice exclaim, “Oh! The poor, pretty creature!”
Then it all went away.
interlude
CAZ WAS asleep. I was lying beside her, too buzzed to do anything except think, think, think. God knows, I should have been sleeping too, after the day I’d just had—ambushed while trying to auction off something I didn’t actually have, shot at, chased by an ancient supernatural monster, several minutes under extremely cold water breathing through a tube, then a couple of hours of vigorous sex with a she-demon. I should have slept for a hundred years like Sleeping Beauty. Instead, Not-Sleeping Bobby lay in Caz’s curtained bed with his hands laced behind his head, watching the translucent fabric sway gently in the air-conditioning. The curtains were red, bright yellow, and several shades of earth tones. It seemed odd to me that she would choose such flamelike colors, but the entire apartment was like that, a cross between a grand opera about the Middle East and a Dutch prostitute’s red-light flat.
I was thinking, but not about anything important. I couldn’t afford to think about anything important, because at that moment I couldn’t do anything about anything. I could have closed my eyes and tried to force myself to sleep, but that never works with me. So instead I just lay there, listening to Caz’s quiet breathing and fantasizing about an impossible day when we could be together like this without threatening the entire balance of Creation. But any attempt to imagine a future for us quickly fell apart. Even assuming we weren’t vaporized for our crimes by her bosses or mine, where would we live? What would we do?
Before that night, I would have immediately recognized the stupidity of even thinking about an angel like me living a normal, human life. I would have shaken my head, laughed ruefully, then gone out with Sam for a couple of drinks to soak the ashes of the extinguished dream and render it harmless forever. But I wasn’t sure that was going to work this time. I wasn’t sure if I wanted it to work.
But what was my alternative? This one night, as Caz kept saying, and then nothing? Only memories? I’d been born into my angelic existence without any real memories at all, so I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to have memories that were better than the rest of your life could ever be. How could someone live like that? How could someone keep any kind of faith that the universe made sense?