Fun, fun, fun, any way you sliced it. It’s a wonder more people don’t make Hell a holiday destination.
Considering we were in a building that looked from the outside like some kind of giant tubeworm had excreted it, and from the inside like a bad acid trip version of a Renaissance tower, the drowned girl’s office was surprisingly ordinary. She sat at an ancient wooden desk, the old-fashioned kind called a “secretary,” with lots of pigeonholes to stash things and a large framed mirror sitting front and central in the middle of the desk surface. The windows of the quiet, dark room looked out over a backwater of the Phlegethon called the Bay of Tophet. The whole expanse of river seethed, flames floating on the black boil and sending curls of steam into the red-lit air; the view out the window seemed like a piece of theatrical scenery. The drowned girl herself looked pretty much the way you’d guess. Although swollen in places, she was still slender, the effect heightened by the lank, dripping hair that hung down to the shoulders of her wet, vaguely medieval-looking dress. Her skin was exactly the kind of blue-white ghastly and puffy-at-the-edges you’d expect. Her pale, bleached-out eyes watched me intelligently (if a bit resentfully), but every now and then they just rolled up behind her lids and stayed that way for a while, which left me staring at a very realistic corpse in an office chair.
“I am Marmora.” She sounded like she still had some water in her lungs. “And you are apparently Pseudolus of Prespa,” she continued, reading the sheet of vellum I’d handed her. (I’d decided “Snakestaff” had pissed off too many people for me to walk into Eligor’s and use that name again.) “What is your business with the Grand Duke Eligor?”
Cutting off the duke’s Grand Nuts, I wanted to say, or anything similar that would express my feelings about the huge amount of bullshit I owed him for, not least of which was stealing back the girlfriend I’d stolen from him. “It’s regarding another member of my sect, the late Prosecutor Grasswax,” is what I said instead. “The Liars Sect has sent me here.” They hadn’t, of course, but that was what my forged documents showed. “I just want to ask him a few questions about Grasswax.”
“That will not happen.” Her sour smile was made a little creepier by the stream of liquid that dribbled from her lower lip. “His Grand Ducal Highness is far too busy to see someone like you.”
“I understand.” I hadn’t expected to get an audience, and in fact I didn’t want one, I just wanted a chance to get in and explore. “Who else could I talk to?”
“Nobody.” She pushed the vellum back to me, her fingers so soft, damp, and swollen that they left little shreds of skin on the document. “Grasswax was never in the grand duke’s employ.”
“But he came here often. And I’ve been told he performed some, well, informal tasks for Grand Duke Eligor—”
“That doesn’t matter. His Grand Ducal Highness will not see you, and nobody else here can tell you anything about our master’s . . . informal arrangements. I suggest you take your inquiries elsewhere.” She stared at me for a long moment, a strangely intimate moment, although it was hard to look back into those cloudy, ruined eyes. “I would prefer not to have to call Snaghorn and his guards to show you out, but I will if I must.” She said it almost as if she truly meant it, which was kind of her, but it was still bad news. I’d hoped to get farther and stay longer, maybe even work up an idea of where Caz was being held.
I stood there clutching my forged documents, wondering what to do next. All I’d come up with was either asking for a public restroom or faking a seizure when I heard a harshly musical tone like a long icicle cracking. Marmora turned her bleary stare to the mirror on the desk. “Yes, Countess?”
Needless to say, I was suddenly pulled as tight as a guitar string. I stepped back from the desk and wandered a short distance away, as though respectfully giving Marmora her privacy, but I was really just trying to find an angle where I could see the front of the mirror.
It was her in the glass, her amazing face, right there in front of me. I couldn’t hear anything she was saying, although the drowned girl obviously could, but that didn’t matter. It was her, Caz, and after all this time she was actually within reach. All I’d have to do would be to interrupt Marmora, and I would be speaking directly to the woman I loved. I wasn’t going to do anything that stupid, of course, but I wanted to, I really did. There she was, the same beautiful, terrifying vision I’d first met when she appeared at the Edward Walker death scene, blood-red eyes and all. But Caz looked pale and tired now, oh so tired, and even from where I stood, I could see how much effort it was taking her to carry on this domestic conversation with Marmora. God, I wanted her. I wanted nothing but to sneak away from the drowned girl and try to find her, but I knew that would be suicide of an extremely certain kind.
“Yes, Countess, of course I’ll arrange that,” Marmora said. “When would you like to go? First night of the Wolf? I’ll arrange it. How big is that party?” I watched Caz speaking and wondered where in this vast tower complex she was right now. It was agonizing. Could I just sneak out and find her? Take her with me right now? Was I making things too difficult?
“Do you want to be on the Leopold Square side of the Circus?” Marmora asked. There was an odd tone to her voice, as if she was dealing with Caz in the hell-minion version of arm’s-length. Did she dislike the Countess of Cold Hands, or was something more complicated going on? And why should I care anyway? “Right, then, the Leopold Square end,” the drowned girl said. “Very good, my lady.”
Caz’s face vanished from the mirror. I thanked the drowned girl for helping me. Marmora gave me a strange look that reminded me “thank you” was not commonly heard in Hell.
“You should leave these matters alone and go back to the lower levels, Lord Pseudolus,” she said as I walked out. “You will be a mouse to the cats of Pandaemonium.”
I think she was being nice.
As soon as the dripping secretary had said “Circus,” I was pretty certain I knew where Caz would be going on the first night of the Festival of the Wolf, only a couple of hellish days away. Wolf was the closest thing to a holiday they had in Hell, a great orgy of public bloodletting and even worse-than-usual behavior. The Circus had to be the Circus of Commodus, Pandaemonium’s version of Madison Square Garden or Wembley Stadium. It might be my only chance to talk to Caz outside of Flesh Horse, which might mean it was also my last chance to carry her off. (Yes, even at this late date I confess I was still considering the thing in romantic terms like that, despite the fact that Caz was at least as strong as me and knew Hell a lot better than I ever would. Or at least a lot better than I hoped I ever would.) So, I now needed to change tactics. Just slip out the back, Jack. Make a new plan, Stan.
I remember stuff like that at the weirdest times.
Dis Pater Square is the biggest public space in Pandaemonium, the heart of Hell’s capital city. But just as the center of Paris starts at Notre Dame and stretches along the Champs Elysees to the Arc de Triomphe, so the center of Hell stretched all the way along the Via Dolorosa, the wide, grim avenue where triumphant demon-generals marched. The Circus, otherwise known as the Amphitheater of Commodus, was at the end of the Via Dolorosa, next to Leopold Square. Commodus was one of the worst of the Roman emperors, a murderous psychopath in the vein of Caligula and Nero, but unlike Nero, Commodus had never tried to cheat Hell. In fact, Commodus had a major landmark in Hell named after him instead of a forgotten bridge, so my guess was that Eligor and Caym and the boys weren’t making Emperor Commodus sing opera in front of heckling crowds, either.
It cost two spits to travel by ferry across the steaming expanse of the Bay of Tophet, but it was much faster than walking, and I didn’t want to jam myself into one of the lurching, packed trains. I reached the landing at Leopold Square before the second beacon had even been lit, leaving me the infernal afternoon to reconnoiter. The amphitheater was closed, but a bribe to a guard—who looked like someone had tried to make walrus jerky and failed—got me inside, then a wearying hike up stony steps got me to the top to look around.