Vera disappeared after a few thousand hours.
“Little man,” said the grand duke, grinning. “You’ve had a busy day.”
He sent me to a room whose floor was wire mesh painted with acid. The flesh kept melting off my bones and dripping through, and as determinedly as I crawled, the door remained just as far away.
An endless desert of broken glass and salt.
A dim forest full of predatory birds with teeth. They laughed like demented children.
More fire. Needles. Filth. Innocents suffering. Over and over and over.
Over and over.
As kind of a break between bouts of indescribable agony, Eligor would pause the torture ride to explain how things in the universe really worked. Kind of like those old educational fillers they used to run between the Saturday morning kids’ cartoons.
The first time, he appeared as I was screaming helplessly and said, “You know, you’ve got it all wrong.”
I didn’t answer, being too busy spitting out blood and bile.
“You see, Heaven has you suckered. They’re not against what we do—they ordered us to do it. We’re the official alternative. We’re as much a part of God’s system as the guards who work in a prison.”
I spat again, and mustered a single, “Bite me.”
“No, really. You might as well hold a grudge against the factory that makes judges’ gavels. We’re doing our job, same as you.”
Another time he popped in to say, “Actually, I lied when I told you we’re doing Heaven’s work. Because there’s really no such thing as Heaven.”
I wasn’t going to respond this time. Something had pulled my tongue out a few hours earlier and hadn’t bothered to reattach it yet.
“It’s kind of like a science fiction story, really,” the grand duke explained. “Hell, Heaven—it’s all nonsense. Earth was conquered a long time ago by invaders from space, but humans don’t realize it yet. The aliens lifted all this stuff right out of our subconscious to keep us docile, toeing the line and behaving like a good little captive populace. Do you see how it all makes sense now?”
Later on, when I had my tongue back, Eligor had a new explanation. “Actually, it wasn’t aliens. I lied about that. It was humans from the future, when they mastered time-travel. They realized that the kindest gift they could give their benighted ancestors was to create the kind of universe the primitives already believed in. So they did. All this stuff, me, you, the Highest, everything, was invented by mankind’s own descendants. Kind of like being humored by your grandchildren, huh? ‘Yes, Grandpa, that’s right, a loving God watches over you and punishes all the wicked people. Now finish your nap.’”
The grand duke seemed to love doing this, and kept reappearing with some new explanation of how the universe was ordered, many of them possibilities I had considered myself. Maybe one of them was true. Maybe more than one. Maybe none. I’m pretty sure that he was just shitting on everything that might explain things, everything that might mean anything at all, so that I was left with the belief that nothing made sense.
A bit like modern political advertising, when you think about it.
Anyway, even Eligor got tired of that game after what seemed a few centuries, and left me to the serious physical torture, which went on and on despite the fact that I had no secrets left. Or perhaps because of that. It’s hard to know with Hell. You can’t even be sure about death and taxes there. The only certain things are pain and sorrow and then more pain.
“So, Doloriel.” Eligor put down his cup and sat up straight in his conference chair, as if the flames and poison and murder had just been the preliminary handshakes and bows, and now the business meeting could begin. “Tell me where the feather is now.”
It felt like it took me about an hour to find the strength to talk. “I . . . told . . . you. I told you everything.”
“No, as a matter of fact, you didn’t. You told me it was in your jacket pocket, hidden by some angel trickery, with your body in a house in San Judas. My people went over every inch of the place. Your body isn’t there.”
Even out where I was, on the far side of a million years of torment, this scared me, not because I cared about my Earth body at this point, or even G-Man and his girlfriend Posie, who were living in the house, but because all I wanted to do now was die the real and final death, and I knew Eligor wouldn’t kill me until he had the feather back. “It’s . . . gone?”
“In fact, now that I think of it, the whole thing’s a bit convenient. You had the feather all along and didn’t know it? And it was your buddy Sammariel who caught Grasswax trying to plant it on you? Cute, since your friend’s hiding out in that discount version of Heaven the Third Way dreamers created. And to make it even more suspicious, we both know who Sammariel takes his orders from.”
I was having trouble keeping up and not just because of the pain. Eligor was wrong, I hadn’t tried to hold anything back. If the feather was gone, if my body had disappeared, I was just as surprised as anyone. “Sam takes orders from . . . ? You mean Kephas?”
“Yes, ‘Kephas,’ or whatever name you want to use. The architect of this whole fiasco.”
The mysterious higher angel had recruited Sam to the Third Way, and had given him the tools to make it happen, including the thing Sam called “the God Glove,” which he had used to hide Eligor’s marker for his deal with Kephas, namely Kephas’ own angelic wing-feather. Hid it on me, as it turned out, although I hadn’t known it at the time. It was what got me onto Eligor’s radar in the first place. I really wished I had never seen or heard of the thing.
Bam! Eligor hit the table and made his cup jump, sloshing coffee across the imitation wood grain Formica just as if it were real coffee in a real room in a real place. “I want it. And you’re going to fetch it back for me.”
“Yeah, right. If it’s gone, I don’t know where it is, either. Get thee behind me, Shit Hat.”
I didn’t really feel him hit me, it happened so quickly. I just suddenly realized I was on the other side of the room, lying in a heap on the patterned carpet with my vision blurred and my head clanging like a church bell. Eligor stood over me, twenty feet from where he had just been sitting. “Watch your mouth. You wouldn’t be the first dead angel I’ve made.” He leaned in closer. His Vald disguise seemed perfect from a distance, just like a human body and face, but from inches away I could see the fires beneath the skin leaking through his pores. “However, I’m a pragmatist, so I’ll make you an offer, Little Wing. You may live to fight another day for the glory of your bullshit Holy City in the Sky.”
I didn’t dare breathe, let alone speak, because I was still nearly paralyzed by how hard he’d hit me, and even after all the shit I’d just been through, I was terrified he’d hit me again. It felt like he’d shattered every bone in my body, and I was quite ready to roll on my back and show him my belly. What had made me think I could mess around with something like Eligor and survive? Nobody that stupid deserved to live.
The grand duke was suddenly back in his chair. A moment later, with no conscious understanding of how it happened, I was sitting in the chair across from him once more, trembling like a whipped puppy.
“Here’s the deal,” he said. “I want that feather. It should never have left my possession. It’s my insurance policy for Kephas keeping faith. I don’t trust anyone, but I trust ambitious angels least of all, and Kephas is nothing if not ambitious. So you’re going to go back and get it, then give it to me. If you don’t . . .” he lifted his hand and suddenly Caz was there beside him. This time she had a blindfold over her eyes and a gag in her mouth, her hands bound behind her back. “If you don’t, I’ll give her everything I’ve just given you, and a lot more.”
I had no power, no leverage, nothing. I was completely outgunned, outsmarted, and outclassed. I didn’t have any choice at all.