Much as I hated the bitch, I didn’t stay to watch. The moment I could see a clear space, I stumbled past the bizarre reunion, ran, heart ratcheting, until I found the stairs at the far side of the cellar, then climbed for what seemed like days upon lightless days. Vera’s hoarse shrieks followed me for a long part of that journey, until I finally found myself in a regular part of the tunnels near the Terminus. From there I was able to make my way upward, to stand free at last beneath Hell’s vaulted, claustrophobic night sky.
I could never have guessed how glad I would be to see that terrible blank firmament again.
twenty-seven:
chancery
ONE GOOD thing about Hell is that there’s never any problem getting rid of stolen goods, no matter how late it is. I’d had a lot of time to think between visits from Vera and her vampire groin, and I’d come up with a few ideas of what to do next if I ever got the chance. Now I had it.
Vera’s fancy neighborhood was on the edge of Sulfur Lagoon, a prestige location close to, among other things, the Night Market, a vast array of stalls and tents and shacks made of various awful things where you could buy or sell pretty much anything. Limping and bloody (two things that fortunately don’t attract much notice in Hell) I made my way to the market and asked around until I found the bazaar of a fellow named Saad Babrak who looked like a hairless tarantula from his neck downward and had a reputation as a discreet disperser of goods. In other words, a fence.
I could only hope Vera’s jewelry was good quality. I hung onto one necklace of lumpy, lagoon-grown pearls (I’ll explain why later) but dumped all the rest of the stuff on Saad’s counter and let him piss all over me in the guise of “bargaining.” I didn’t want to give in too easily because he’d remember that, but I also didn’t want to be there so long that Smyler or some other survivor from Vera’s house found me. At last I got a price I could live with, spent a little on the spot purchasing some of Saad’s other goods, including some clean clothes which I didn’t put on right away and a long, sharp, well-made knife with a backward-curving guard; the kind of thing I wanted to have in my hand the next time I wound up fighting for my life.
I’d made two gold weights, three copper handfuls, and a couple of iron spits in change from the stolen stuff, plus the coins I’d already taken from Vera’s jewelry box, so I was pretty much wealthy, at least for a while. Jewelry dumped and pockets jingling with money, I picked the inn with the least horrifying reputation I could find, a place called the Black Ostrich, that overlooked the stinking backwater where the Styx bellied out into Sulfur Lagoon. I probably looked pretty beat up already, so as I paid I showed the innkeeper my knife, informed him I wouldn’t be sleeping during my stay so there was no point trying to rob and murder me, and suggested strongly that he and the rest of his employees would be happiest if they avoided my room entirely. Then I dragged myself upstairs and went to work.
One of the things I’d bought from Saad’s bazaar was a jug of firewater. Yes, that’s what it’s called, and it’s not the Dodge City kind. It’s made from the waters of the burning river Phlegethon, it’s uglier in the mouth than Riprash’s rum, and you don’t need to drink much before you want to go out and beat some people to bloody pulp. I drank a bit more carefully than that, just enough to kill the worst of the pain from my long captivity and dull what I was about to do to myself.
I’d bought one more thing from Saad’s place, a cracked hunk of mirror glass: very few people in Hell want to own mirrors, for some reason, and there certainly wasn’t going to be one in a cheap hostel like the Black Ostrich. Now that I could see myself, I went to work, slicing lines in the skin of my face and liberally dousing them with firewater, pausing every few minutes to stick my bloody face into the filthy mattress and scream, because it hurt really fucking bad, let me tell you.
Once I’d cut myself along the brow line, forehead, cheeks, nose, and jaw, I dabbed away the slow-moving blood, then sliced the cord on Vera’s pearl necklace and began tucking the individual pearls into my bleeding weals. I’d seen a ritual like it on a National Geographic TV show; young guys in Africa or New Guinea or somewhere stuffing their sliced skin with stones and ashes to make impressive scars. I didn’t care about impressive, I just wanted to change the look of my face. I had almost vomited out my own heart when Caym the President seemed to recognize me. Ultimately I might wind up trying to fool Eligor himself, but as I had discovered to my surprise and shock, whatever process Temuel had used to get me into this body had left me looking a lot more like my Bobby Dollar self than I could risk. So, self-mutilation.
I kept drinking little nips of the firewater, and that blotted out the worst of the agony, but there was so much blood that I quickly soaked the few rags I’d lifted at the bazaar. No point in putting on my new, clean clothes until the bleeding stopped, so I dabbed my wounds one last agonizing time with Phlegethon-liquor, then laid myself down to sleep through the worst of the pain.
I dreamed of Caz, of course, of our last night together in Eligor’s hotel before he blew the fucking thing to kingdom come, but in my dream we couldn’t make love because bits of me kept falling off and crawling around on a floor slippery with blood. At one point I roused myself from the mattress long enough to douse myself in the burning liquid again, then did my best to fall back asleep, but I could actually feel the skin knitting together over my new scars—a disturbing, tingling sensation like ants dancing in little white-hot metal shoes. After awhile I just gave up and lay with gritted teeth, waiting for the pain to subside enough for sleep to come.
It took more than a few hours. I was beginning to feel right at home in Hell now—angry, miserable, hurting, you name it. Cheated, too. Like everyone else here, I was having trouble understanding what I had done to be suffering this way.
Now that I was comparatively safe I gave the scars a full day to heal, going out to the Night Market only long enough to grab something disgusting to eat before slinking back to my room at the Ostrich. When the pain of my self-surgery had dwindled to a dull ache, I got out the broken mirror and examined my handiwork. It was a strange look: my bumpy new brow and the lumpy lines along my cheekbones and jaw made me look like some kind of desert lizard. I used a little carbon from the candlewick so my eyes would seem more deep-sunk beneath the knobby shelf I’d created. It made me even uglier, but that was fine. There’s no right or wrong in Hell as far as how people look, and my only goal was to look less like Bobby Dollar, Enemy of the State.
I lay down again to think, because I had a lot to think about. How had Smyler found me? Had Eligor brought him back here from the real world like recalling an employee from a field office? It was the only thing that made sense. But if the grand duke could find me to set Smyler on me, why hadn’t he done it sooner? Why hadn’t Eligor sent the Murderers Sect instead? And why hadn’t any of my enemies showed up here at my new hiding place?
Commissar Niloch and others had mentioned someone the authorities were hunting, an intruder, and I’d assumed that was me. But what if it was Smyler all along? What if he’d somehow followed me into Hell and only caught up to me when I was stuck at Vera’s house?