I slipped back down again, out of sight. “Caz!” I said as loudly as I dared. “Countess!”
Nothing came back to me. I raised myself to the top again, hanging by my aching fingers. “Countess! Caz!” I hissed.
She turned, looked quickly in my direction, than looked away again just as fast. Candy and Cinnamon were still talking to each other, not even watching her. “Whoever you are,” she said with quiet urgency, “go away. You can’t imagine how bad . . .”
“Oh, yes, I can,” I said. I edged a little closer so I could keep my voice low. My fingers were really beginning to hurt. “Because I’ve been through it. He already sent that thing with the horns after me, remember?”
I saw her face swivel toward me again, sudden and pale as the moon appearing from behind trees, but only for an instant. “Go away,” she said, or at least I thought so. I could barely hear her over the crowd.
“Have you forgotten me already, Caz?” I was desperate to get back onto the ledge because my fingers felt like they were caught in a giant mousetrap, but it was her, it was her and she was talking to me. “Your locket saved me. I never got to tell you. It saved me.”
She went still as stone. For long moments I thought something had happened to her, that her soul had flown right out of her body. When she did speak, she still kept her face turned away.
“I don’t know who you are, but if you say another word I’ll call the guards, and then Grand Duke Eligor will peel your skin off and carve your bones into toothpicks. Do you understand? Leave me alone.” She started back down the stairs. Clearly irritated to have to move again, Candy and Cinnamon fell in behind her, a wall of nasty gray muscle. I could only hang helplessly against the amphitheater stones like a dying lizard as she left.
twenty-nine:
breath of heaven
CAZ WALKING away like that—well, it felt like a tornado had touched down in the middle of my chest, torn up and destroyed everything inside me, and then suddenly moved on. I could hear the damned and their jailers all around me, screaming with glee at the spectacle below, but all that horror was suddenly just noise. I was so shocked I could hardly think.
At last, my survival instincts kicked in. Obviously I couldn’t just cling to the facade of the colosseum all day, so I worked my way back to where I’d been and crawled over the rim and into the Circus. The customers below me didn’t notice because they were busy bellowing their pleasure as the last two crippled, bleeding almost-men confronted each other on the sand below, each with a long dagger in his teeth, neither able to crawl the rest of the distance to victory without disposing of his rival. The spectators were also throwing rocks and other heavy things down at the two struggling figures, either trying to help the one they’d bet on or just wanting to see a little more suffering.
I slumped down on a bench and let the hot stink of the place wash over me. I was beginning to feel like I belonged there, just another self-pitying loser in the Big Basement. I’d blown it, and I didn’t even know how. My only chance to see Caz alone, and she’d turned her back on me. She’d even promised Eligor would destroy me if I didn’t leave her alone—I mean, talk about rubbing my nose in it . . . !
It hit me then, the obvious thing I’d missed. After I thought about it for a few seconds, I rose and made my way back up to the top row. Down below, one of the contestants had managed to slit the other’s throat, and was crawling away as his victim writhed on a spreading expanse of red sand. I could feel the excitement of the spectators rise even higher. They were like sharks—if there was blood, they were interested.
I sat down a couple of feet from where Caz had stood. “Go away,” she’d said at least twice, but she never moved closer to her guards, several yards away, and she’d barely looked up. Why would she keep her back to a potential problem? Why wouldn’t she at least raise her voice to get the guards’ attention? Because she knew it was me, and she knew I was quite capable of doing something this stupid. Maybe she was trying to protect me from my own eagerness. Had I really expected her to have a joyous reunion with me out here in front of all of Hell, with Eligor only a few dozen rows down? Caz was too smart for that.
While pretending to watch the last Lykaion survivor crawling toward the finish, I looked around carefully in case she had dropped a note or a key, anything to tell me what we should do next, but saw only the usual filth. I even got down on my hands and knees where she’d been and searched in every crack of the ancient stone, but there was nothing to find, nothing hidden or discarded.
Despair washed over me again. For a moment, I’d been so certain that she’d been telling me to be more careful, that she needed more privacy, or time, or something, but now I began to think I’d been right in the first place: She’d either forgotten me or didn’t want to see me. After all I’d been through to get here, I was fucked, and there just wasn’t any other way to spin it.
Then I spotted it. It wasn’t easy, because it was almost the same color as the stone—a long thread only a little brighter than the great blocks of lava in the wall—snagged on an edge about waist-high. I reached out and lifted it gently with my finger. It was very fine thread, something that would have been expensive even on Earth, I guessed, but much more so here in Hell. It was almost the same length on either side of the snag, as though someone had held it by each end and draped it carefully in place. But if Caz had done it, what did it mean?
Of course Caz had done it. This was the woman who had managed to steal Eligor’s angel feather, and to sleight-of-hand her locket into my coat right under the Grand Duke of Hell’s pointy nose. She’d left the thread for me. She wanted me to use it to find her. I refused to believe anything else.
Another roar came from below. The seemingly defeated contestant with the slashed throat had caught his rival from behind, sunk his teeth into the poor bastard’s leg, and ripped out his hamstring; he might have lost the race but he was going to make certain his rival didn’t win either. The spectators, like most Hell-dwellers, were big fans of fucking up the other guy’s chances. They responded with cheers of approval as the two bloody bodies wriggled more and more slowly before coming to a halt at last, only a few yards from the finish. A squadron of large Murderers Sect demons with no-shit pitchforks was marching toward them, and I doubted either of the contestants was being retired to stud.
I didn’t bother to watch the very end. I was already on my way down the stairs, headed for the Night Market.
Saad the fence lifted the cracked lens he wore on a cord around his neck and squinted an eye. He held the thread up to get as much light on it as possible and examined it from several different angles, his pink spider legs tilting it up and down. Then he dropped it back into my hand.
“One handful,” he said. “Take it or leave it.”
“I don’t want to sell it, I want to know what it is—where it’s from!”
Saad licked his cracked lips with a tongue like a black garter snake. “I know. Cost you one handful to find out.” He gave me a harshly amused look. “You don’t think I tell you for free, do you? Hah! I don’t shit on someone for free.”
I still had quite a bit of Vera’s money, so the cost itself wasn’t an issue, but I didn’t want anyone around here to know I was comparatively wealthy, so I haggled and fought with Saad until he was waggling most of his arms in fury, and I got it down to four spit. Trust me, in Hell, fighting for every penny is just common sense, like hanging your food so the bears don’t come into your camp at night. Actually, it’s almost exactly like that, except bears are easier to negotiate with than whoever’s after your money in Hell.
My iron spits finally in Saad’s cash box, he directed me to a silk merchant named Han Fei out at the far end of the Night Market. I learned a few interesting things from that unpleasant gentleman, who imported the incredibly expensive silk from down on the Phlegethon levels. It was so expensive because it was actually made from the silk of real silkworms, or at least the kind of silkworms that could grow in Hell, apparently. I found out later that what they called “silkworms” in Hell was very much the same as what they called “slaves,” “prisoners,” and “the usual suspects”—the shiny threads were derived somehow from the torture of prisoners who had apparently been reborn in Hell as something that could be farmed for thread to keep the most wealthy of the hell-lords beautifully clothed.