That was about all the thought I could give it, since there wasn’t much point in trying to figure things out from so little information. I was here for Caz, that was what mattered, and I had a lot to do, some of which was going to be downright terrifying. Putting it off would only make things worse. Only the Highest knew how long I’d already been in this horrible place, but it felt like half a year or more. For all I knew, there was already a heavenly APB out for me. In many, many ways, I was running out of time.
The Ministry of Justice, also known as the Chancery, was in the deepest, most overbuilt section of the Red City, a crooked maze of close-leaning towers and guarded doorways behind Dis Pater Square. I had been praying I wouldn’t have to see Chancellor Urgulap again, the hideous giant-beetle-thing that had interviewed me back on Earth about the death of Prosecutor Grasswax. Luckily, as a member of the minor gentry Snakestaff of the Liars Sect was far too unimportant to get a meeting with the chancellor, and was instead fobbed off on a (literally) very sharp young woman, who seemed to be made entirely out of scissor parts. Urgulap was present only in a portrait that hung on the wall, watching over the dark office, his shell buffed to a gleam and his inhuman face frozen in a glower of determined leadership.
“We cannot give you that information, Lord Snakestaff,” the Scissor Sister told me. “The chancellor has not completed his investigation, which he will present to the Senate and Council soon.”
“That’s okay,” I said, trying to imagine how reckless a guy would have to be to go to bed with a woman whose thighs were sharpened blades. “I just need to do something with this thing.” I tried to hand her a piece of vellum, but only managed to knock several of the files off her desk. She gave me a look of shiny distaste, then her metal surfaces rasped as she bent to pick them up. When finished, she examined the writing on the piece of stretched, smoothed skin. “What is this? Some sort of debt?”
“That’s right,” I said. “Grasswax owed me almost two weights. Gambling debts.” (The real Grasswax had indeed liked a wager, and lost pretty frequently from what I’d heard. But not only hadn’t he lost to me, I didn’t even know what contests or games he liked.) “So, could I get, I don’t know, paid out of his estate? When the investigation’s over?”
“Doesn’t your sect allow you to pursue these matters out of Grasswax’s redenture?”
I did my best to look embarrassed, which wasn’t that hard since I had no idea what a redenture even was. “Yeah. They sort of . . . kicked me out. I’m not in the Liars Sect any more.” I shrugged. “I caught on with the Thieves.”
She rubbed one of her blades down her nose, which was also a blade. Skrrkkkkkkk. “All right,” she said at last. “Fine. Leave this with me, and I’ll put it into the files. With an explanation.” She frowned, which looked pretty odd, I can tell you. “But don’t expect too much.”
I stood. “Why would I? This is Hell.”
Outside, I stepped into the dark space of a tower doorway to make certain I’d grabbed the right thing while Scissor Sister was picking up the stuff I knocked over. I took a quick look at the out-basket files I’d stolen, a few pieces of vellum with official Chancery letterhead. More important, though, was the other thing I’d lifted, a wooden stamp that looked like it might have come right off Ebenezer Scrooge’s desk, except instead of “Scrooge & Marley” it said “Ministry of Justice.”
Perfect.
I didn’t sleep very well that night, and it wasn’t just because of the intermittent shrieks of agony from the promenade along Sulfur Lagoon. They weren’t really any worse than the stink of the lagoon itself, and both were easier to ignore than the weird buzzing, gagging sex two or three somethings were having in the room above mine.
I was finally ready, after all this time, to do what I had come to Hell to do, or at least to begin doing it. If you know me at all by now, you know that I’m not so stupid as to do the same stupid thing every time—I prefer to alternate my stupidities. I had been discreetly checking into Eligor’s setup (loyalty is almost nonexistent in Hell, and bribery is one of the favorite pastimes). I wasn’t going to just charge into his fortress of a house. I knew I couldn’t just saunter in and liberate Caz. I wasn’t even going to make a plan until I knew more. That was why I had been sitting up all evening making fake Ministry of Justice documents for myself, until I had come up with something that satisfied my intention to walk in and out of Eligor’s stronghold with my skin on and my vital organs still in their original places.
When I’d tackled Eligor in his earthly stronghold at Five Page Mill back in San Judas, I hadn’t known who and what I was dealing with. I did now. I was pretty sure I’d only get one shot to get her away from him, and I’d have to be very lucky to get even that. I needed a real plan, but first I needed to see his castle, called Flesh Horse, up close.
Just getting near it was difficult, because although the top levels had the same kind of connective branches leading horizontally to other great mansions, they were all closely guarded. Like the Infernal Cabinet House and most other important buildings in Pandaemonium, the base of Flesh Horse sat in a wide park, walled off from its neighbors. The grounds were tangled with blood-colored trees and aggressively guarded by legions of what looked like albino scorpions with wolves’ heads. They didn’t worry me too much, because I was intending to walk right in through the front door, at least this first time.
Flesh Horse was many acres wide at its base and stretched up so far into the smoky sky that even with the red day lamps burning in the walls I couldn’t see its top. The great, stony castle didn’t actually look like a horse, or like flesh, but it didn’t look like a nice place, either. Still, Caz was in there somewhere, and I desperately needed to get her back. It felt like doing that was the only thing that might keep me sane.
So I spent several days on my due diligence and lots of money on bribes, gathering information and prepping myself. I had a special set of clothes made by a tailor at the Night Market, and paid another visit to Saad the pink tarantula to pick up a few additional necessities. My scars were all but healed now, the bumpiness of my face still just as ugly but a lot less recent-looking.
The night before I started my mission, I drank myself to near-unconsciousness with Phlegethon firewater because I was too tightly wound to sleep otherwise. In the near darkness Hell calls morning, I took one last swallow to burn out the hangover and the musty taste in my mouth, then carefully dressed and prepared myself before walking out into the Red City, whistling the theme to The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.
Okay, I wasn’t doing that last part. I admit that I was wishing Clint Eastwood could have been there too, but it was only yours truly.
twenty-eight:
the drowned girl
HERE’S A tip. If you’re a Mormon missionary or a door-to-door salesman, don’t waste your time and outer skin visiting Flesh Horse. My forged documents got me more attention than I would have liked, but they also got me inside the tower and into an appointment with Eligor’s Chief of Security. The grand duke’s previous head of security, my old friend Howlingfell, had been eaten by a large supernatural monstrosity that was supposed to eat me instead—something I can honestly say I enjoyed a great deal. The new chief, a hideous thing named Snaghorn, resembled a bloody, skinned grizzly bear with snail-stalks for eyes. He’d never seen me before, which doesn’t mean he heartily invited me in, of course: Snaghorn spent a good fifteen minutes just sniffing me. I’m sure he was just doing his job, but he seemed to do it for a very long time. A very, very long time. But at last Snaghorn seemed satisfied. Instead of biting any parts off me, he touched a curving black claw to my forehead. It felt like I’d been branded, and in a way, I had: he’d given me his mark, which meant limited permission to move through the lower levels of the house. Not by myself, of course, and not freely. I had an appointment with someone Snaghorn curtly referred to as “the drowned girl.”