I struggled through the chaos looking for Riprash, but the ogre appeared as if from nowhere, picked me up by the back of my neck like a stray puppy, and carried me toward the window. He held Gob in his other massive hand, and before I could even make sense of his plan, Riprash had leaned so far out of the window that the boy and I were dangling in midair, nothing beneath us until the hard stone cobbles nearly a hundred feet below. I didn’t have much time to think, however, because a moment later I felt a massive yank and Gob and I were flying through the air with everything spinning around us like the view in a kaleidoscope. It took me a panicked half-second or more before we crashed and rolled and slid to a halt, and I realized that Riprash hadn’t flung us down, but all the way up onto the roof of the warehouse. After that, I was too busy to think about anything much, trying to find my weapons and dodge the shrieking Lifters who had found their way to the roof.
I quickly got separated from Gob in the mad skirmish. It was no longer just the other Lifters on the tiled roof now—the Murderers Sect bullies had arrived, climbing up after us, and they were wading into the nearest of the squealing heretics, dealing out what looked like serious pain, tearing flesh from backs with their bladed whips, crushing limbs and skulls with heavy maces. Those they had beaten down were hauled away in nets, trussed, and left at the corner of the roof while the guards concentrated on those of us who were still free.
As I staggered toward the edge of the roof, waving my boot knife and trying to put as much space between the guards and myself as possible, I heard a scraping, rasping crash and then thunder from just below us. I looked over the edge and saw that Riprash had taken the easiest way out of the room downstairs, smashing his way through the constricting windowframe, taking a lot of the surrounding wall with him as he jumped to the distant ground. He had apparently landed safely and now stood in the middle of a pile of debris and shattered paving, looking up.
“Jump down!” the ogre bellowed when he saw me. “I’ll catch you! Don’t be afraid!” He held out his massive paws. I hesitated, not because I didn’t trust him, but because I still didn’t know where Gob was, and I couldn’t just leave the kid behind. He never would have been in Pandaemonium if it hadn’t been for me.
I saw him at last, struggling like a wet cat in the arms of a guard. Gob’s captor had leathery skin and lips that stuck out in bony, beaklike plates, as if to demonstrate how a real life mutant ninja turtle would be anything but cute. Gamely as he was fighting, Gob clearly didn’t stand a chance; his assailant had already all but immobilized him and was only a moment from getting him into the net with a bunch of others.
I dove on the guard from behind, jabbing my blade deep into where his kidneys should be. I was slowed down by the chain-mail stuff he was wearing, but the demon-cutter was a big knife, and I slammed it into his back with both hands. He made a surprised, croaking noise and let Gob drop. I didn’t bother trying to retrieve the knife, but snatched the kid up and dodged through the chaos of guards and Lifters on my way to the edge of the roof. Down below, Riprash was fighting with three guards, but he was winning, and when I screamed his name he looked up, then made quick work of his enemies, literally knocking the head off one of them with his fist.
I threw Gob down to him. I had a second or two to watch the boy tumble into Riprash’s massive hands, then I was snatched back from the edge of the roof by a couple of Murderer Sectarians. Two or three more joined them, fell on me like thick men on a rugby ball, and that was about it. The last I remembered was someone beating the thoughts out of my skull with some kind of club. It was the worst drum solo ever, and for me, that’s saying something, but fortunately I didn’t have to experience it for long.
thirty-three:
the conference room
I WAS AWAKE for some time before I opened my eyes, but my senses kept telling me I was in a meeting room in some Holiday Inn or a Hilton business hotel when I knew I was actually in Hell. Still, I could definitely smell coffee and glazed donuts and the scent of room freshener purchasable in bulk quantities. I was just trying to make sense of it when someone spoke.
“My, my, Advocate Doloriel, you are a persistent little beast, aren’t you?”
My heart didn’t just sink, it crawled into the darkest, deepest corner of my chest and refused to come out ever again. My eyes popped open, too, even though I immediately wished they hadn’t, so I could have pretended a little longer the whole thing was a clubbing-induced dream.
Grand Duke Eligor stood over me in full hellish nobility drag, seven feet tall, in Renaissance-ish robes of flowing black, with a high collar that came up right under his chin. The only odd detail was that, except for the inhuman smolder of his eyes, he was wearing his Kenneth Vald, human billionaire face instead of one of his really scary ones. Not that I wasn’t scared.
I did my best anyway. “Nice outfit, Ellie. Remind me again what the safe word was.”
He didn’t say anything. The room looked exactly like it smelled, with Vald/Eligor standing at the other side of a perfectly ordinary conference table in a perfectly normal hotel conference room (at least it would have been in Visalia or Bakersfield or San Leandro). There was even a box of donuts and a coffee service, with artificial sweeteners and powdered creamer. The only thing missing from this vision of Rotarian perfection was a window with venetian blinds open to a view of the freeway or a business park next door. But this room had no windows.
Eligor folded himself gracefully into a chair just across from me. I didn’t seem to be restrained in any way, but I wasn’t quite ready to test that—not yet, since it was almost certainly what he’d expect me to do. I had no leverage at all except possibly to do something unexpected, and I probably wouldn’t get a second chance, so I was going to wait until I actually thought of something worth trying. In the meantime, I knew Eligor the Horseman well enough from our previous encounters to know he didn’t mind talking.
“So that was all some trap of yours?”
The grand duke smiled a little. “What, that little holy-roller meeting you were attending? Do you really think I would set some elaborate trap for you? The Countess was right—you do have an exaggerated sense of your own importance. No, nobody even knew you were here, little angel, although you were trying very hard to get noticed. Honestly, you came to my own house, Dollar. I thought Heaven didn’t allow suicide.”
“And I thought Hell would knock the pussy out of someone after a few million years, but clearly I was wrong. You saying you didn’t come after me?”
He shook his head as if it almost wasn’t worth answering. “We’ve been looking for ‘Pseudolus’ ever since you made your little visit to Flesh Horse. Did you think we wouldn’t check with the Liars Sect to see if you were legitimate? Then, when somebody took out his bad temper on Candy and Cinnamon—well, as you can guess, we were getting very interested. When the Pandaemonium City Guards picked you up with those Lifter idiots, one of my informants recognized you as the one we were looking for . . . so here you are.” He shook his head. “You’ve all but ruined the Countess’s bodyguards. Was that really necessary? First you kill my assistant back in San Judas, now you come all the way to my place here and do in a couple of harmless wage-slaves. You have something against working folk?”
“Enough of your bullshit,” I said. “Let’s cut to the hugs and learning so we can finish this. You want the feather. That’s why you sent Smyler after me. Our business with the Countess aside, I had to do something, since it was obvious after that you weren’t going to leave me alone. And you knew I’d made it into Hell because Smyler followed me here, so don’t pretend you’re surprised to see me.”