I was in such a hurry to get to Riprash that I was careless entering the Stygian docks and was stopped by a guard. I had to beat the creature senseless, and when I dragged him into the light I saw he was just a ragged old thing, batlike and frail. I didn’t know if he’d raised some kind of silent alarm, though, so I couldn’t waste a lot of time feeling sorry for him. I shoved him into a dark corner behind a huge coil of rope. I still didn’t know what to think about average folks in Hell. Some of them had probably done such horrible things that if I knew the truth I’d want to burn them to ashes on the spot. Others might have been driven to their crimes by circumstance, like Caz, or might have done so many comparatively good things since their crimes, like Riprash, that it seemed petty to keep punishing them. On the other hand, this was Hell—how much sympathy could I afford to waste on its common folk, especially when nearly all of them would be delighted to see me captured and tortured again?
I made my way to Kraken Dock without running into any more port employees. To my immense joy, I could see The Nagging Bitch bobbing in its slip. I had a bit of a disagreement with the sailor guarding the gangplank, a scaly fellow with webbed fingers and toes, well-designed for a mariner’s life. But I kept my temper, nobody got stabbed, and eventually Riprash himself appeared. When he saw it was me, the ogre hustled me aboard and into his cabin. Gob was sleeping in a corner, curled on a pile of hides like a pet.
Riprash insisted on doctoring me on the spot, dousing my wounds in stinging brine and then covering them with hot tar, a cure that seemed worse than the injuries. Still, I was profoundly grateful just to be in a situation where someone would even think of trying to give me some comfort.
Gob woke up during the doctoring and watched the process with interest. One or two of Riprash’s crew wandered by as well to see who was, as one put it, “Yawping like a pig with the wrong side of its neck cut.”
I warned Riprash that I was currently Hell’s Most Wanted, so he ordered his men to pull up the gangplank and prepare to leave port.
“Might get the Harbor Guard when we reach the outer breakwater,” my favorite ogre told me. “Don’t want a fight, but if we get one, you’ll need something.” He frowned at me. “Wouldn’t hurt to put some clothes on you, too. Styx gets colder as we get out in the center of the channel.”
I was nearly dead on my feet, but I did my best to remain upright while Riprash dug through what he had. None of his own clothes would fit, of course—I might as well have tried to wear an old Sears family camping tent—but he found a few of his boss Gagsnatch’s things in a sea chest. The shirts all had two neck-holes, of course, to go with Gagsnatch’s redundancy in the head department, but with a flick of his dirty fingernail Riprash turned two holes into one large one, and the pants, though baggy, were a better fit than anything of Riprash’s would have been.
None of this helped with the ache in my skull from Doctor Teddy’s brutal surgery, or the knowledge that some kind of crab monster was crouched at the end of my brainstem, ready to execute me, but I couldn’t afford to be picky. I was out of Eligor’s clutches except for that, and it beat the shit out of being flame-broiled, I can tell you.
“Now, weapons,” Riprash rumbled. “Hmmm. Stab-stab or boom-boom? Maybe both.” He lifted out another, much heavier chest like it was a shoebox, and after rattling his way through a pile of his own weapons he pulled out a knife that looked like a slim lady’s dirk in his massive hands but which would serve me well as a sword. I slid it through my belt, feeling like a Halloween pirate, but Riprash wasn’t done yet. At the bottom of the chest he found what he’d been looking for, a brace of pistols wrapped in waterproof canvas. Not the flintlocks I had seen several times in Hell, but something a bit more modern, closer to the cap-and-ball Colt revolvers that had solved the most crucial disagreements of the American West. They were made of rough, black iron, and the grips and other trim were yellowed bone, minutely carved.
“Fellow traded those to me for passage. More or less.” Riprash laughed.
I had been helpless and tormented a long time, so I liked the idea being able to shoot at things that wanted to hurt me. I slipped the guns into my belt on either side, butts forward, then took turns drawing them cross-handed, individually and together, Billy the Kid style. My regenerating hand ached after only a few tries, but the guns were well-balanced. I planned to fire them later on to see how accurately they were sighted.
“You said, ‘more or less’?” I asked as I practiced.
“He stowed away in Foul Bitters. Wanted to get to Pandaemonium. I told him I’d take the pistols as payment. He said no and pulled one of them on me.” Riprash shook his huge head, the wet wound in his skull looking as fresh as if it had just happened. “So I threw him overboard in the Hungry Rock Straits and kept his guns. But I can’t even get a finger into the trigger guard, so you might as well use ’em.”
“I guess the original owner won’t mind.”
“When we go through the Straits you can ask him.” Riprash laughed. “But you’ll have to shout. I hung an anchor on his belt, so he’s probably still on the bottom.”
When Riprash left to see to his duties, I stretched out on the floor of the cabin. Gob watched me silently as I pillowed my head on a set of oilskins.
I fell asleep almost immediately, a deep unconsciousness that would have been dreamless but for the nagging sensation that I was sharing my skull with something far more unpleasant than just my own brain. Which, of course, I was.
I woke to a quiet ship, at least by hellish standards, and for a little while I just lay on the floor of Riprash’s cabin and enjoyed the sensation of not being actively tortured. I probably should have been up on deck keeping watch for dogpaddling hellhounds, but it was my first chance to think without agonizing pain in a long time, and I had a lot to think about, especially the possibility that Smyler hadn’t been working for Eligor after all, but for Kephas—an angel, Sam’s benefactor, and the other half of the grand duke’s little agreement. It made sense in a way, since Heaven had been the last party in possession of Smyler (or at least his ashes) after we captured him and the Bagmen finished with him. But why would Kephas send a psychotic murder machine after St. Jude’s favorite angel, namely me? I knew Heaven’s politics were less squeaky clean than they looked, but that still seemed a bit extreme.
I puzzled over it for a long time, but I was clearly missing some pieces, not least of which was: Who the hell was Kephas? And how did trying to get me stuck with nasty, pointy things gibe with that mysterious angel’s supposed improving-the-lot-of-human-souls agenda?
Frustrated, I heaved myself up and stumbled out to the deck. The Nagging Bitch was in the deep center of the river, and Pandaemonium had shrunk to a distant glow behind us. The Styx was almost beautiful, black and shiny, the waves sprinkled with coppery reflections from the far-off afterlights, the waters undisturbed but for the occasional rolling, cylindrical length of some terrifying river serpent breaching the surface. We had the current and seemed to be making good speed. New mysteries aside, I felt almost hopeful for the first time in longer than I could remember. All I had to do was make it out of Hell and recover the feather, then Eligor would exchange Caz for it. After that—well, if there ever was an “after that,” I’d worry about it then. How I was going to get on with dating a known demoness was a problem of success. I’d deal with it when I had to.
Over what must have been the next couple of days, we raced along the pitchy Styx, past countless disgusting harbors. Riprash wasn’t worried about hiding me from the crew now, since nobody was going ashore, and soon I was spending hours at the ship’s rail watching the coastal towns of Hell slide by.
“Y’see, I been thinking about all this,” Riprash explained to me one night. “It comes to me that maybe it’s time I should be doing something else.”