I was a bit surprised. “Something else? Like what?”
“Bringing the Lifters’ Word to more than just the few,” Riprash said, looking as philosophical as a monstrous giant with a split skull is able to look. “Ever since you brought me that word from you-know-where. I only half-believed Donkeysmile told me a real story until now, y’see, so I never really got up off my haunches to do what I know is right.”
I shook my head in confusion. Riprash explained that a long time before, when he first worked for Gagsnatch, a demon named Donkeysmile had been thrown from another ship, and Riprash rescued him. He found the newcomer to be surprisingly intelligent, good company on the long voyage. Eventually, the newcomer had confessed that he came from somewhere else—in other words, outside of Hell—and passed along the gospel of the Lifters to Riprash. Riprash had been alive so long that he had become, as he put it, “a mite philosophical in my age,” and what the stranger said touched a chord inside him.
I was darkly amused by “Donkeysmile.” If that was what Temuel had chosen to call himself in Hell, then “the Mule,” our nickname for him at the Compasses, had been pretty much right on the money after all. But what had Archangel Temuel been doing in Hell in the first place? Another question that led me nowhere useful.
“But these days, since you came and gave me his words,” Riprash continued, “I’m thinking that there’s more for me to do than just to live on like nothing’s changed. I’m wondering if you coming with Donkeysmile’s message, if that’s like a sign, d’you see? A sign for me that it’s time to do different. To take the Lifters’ message all round, to those who’ve never heard it.”
If Riprash really planned on becoming a missionary in this, the least missionary-friendly place I could imagine, I was glad he and I were going to be parting company pretty soon, probably as soon as we reached Cocytus Landing. I felt bad that I had dropped little Gob in all this, but I told myself the life he’d had in the filth of Abaddon wouldn’t be anything he’d miss much.
I also kept running into Riprash’s strange little employee, the one I had privately named Krazy Kat. He was some kind of bookkeeper, which brought him frequently into Riprash’s presence, and yet every time he saw me he goggled like he had the first time, although he always stopped when he saw that I’d noticed. It was beginning to annoy me and, to be honest, to worry me a little. I asked Riprash where the little catlike fellow had come from.
“Wart? I don’t think he’d been with me for a season before you showed up. He just walked up to Gagsnatch one day, said he’d heard we needed a body could do sums. As it happened, we did, and he’s been with us since. Quiet, and he does seem a bit fixed on you, but other than that I’ve had no trouble from him. I’ll make him come and tell what’s what.”
“I’m not sure—” I began, but Riprash had already sent Gob to fetch him.
“Now,” said Riprash when Gob had returned with the little accountant-creature, “why do you want to be plaguing Snakestaff here with your nonsense, Wart?”
The little fellow looked up in abject terror. He gave a single squeak but otherwise couldn’t summon any useful noises. Out of pity, I convinced Riprash to let me take over the interrogation.
“You’re not in trouble,” I said as reassuringly as I could. “It’s just that I want to know why you’re always looking at me the way you do.”
Now he wouldn’t look at me at all. “Don’t know.”
“Well, think about it. Nobody’s going to hurt you.”
“Lest he tells a lie,” growled Riprash, “’Cause then I’ll have his head right off and eat it,” which probably wasn’t as helpful as the ogre had intended it to be. A good length of time passed before Wart could be roused from his faint, and then it still took a while before his teeth stopped chattering so he could speak.
“Don’t know,” he told me in a tinny little murmur. “Just . . . something about you. Your face. Not those things,” he said, pointing at the bumps I’d added after Vera’s house to disguise myself. “Saw it first time. Feels like . . . I know you. Seen you, anyway.”
But no matter what else I asked him, he couldn’t clear up the mystery. Like a lot of the residents of Hell, little Wart didn’t really remember much about the previous week, let alone the details of his earlier life in Hell. I examined the little demon carefully. He was unexceptional in appearance, at least by hellish standards, somewhere between an alley cat dipped in motor oil and a very ugly lawn gnome, but now that I was really looking hard, there was something about him I couldn’t quite put my finger on, but which nevertheless plucked at my memory. Had I seen him in one of my earliest moments in Hell? If so, his features were so ordinary by local standards I couldn’t believe I’d spent more than a moment looking at him. And if my memory was that good, I should have been out of Hell and cleaning up on Jeopardy.
“Right, Wart, you can go,” Riprash told him at last. “If you think of anything, come tell me, but not in front of anyone but these two,” he said, indicating Gob and me. “Too many ears.”
Wart nodded slowly. “Too many ears,” he said, but the phrase seemed to have caught his attention and he repeated it as if hearing it for the first time. “Too many ears . . .”
The little creature turned to gape at me. I think it came to him just as it came to me.
“Walter . . . ?” I said. “Walter Sanders? Is that you? What are you doing here?”
And it was him, I could see it now through all that weird—Walter Sanders, my angel buddy from back at the Compasses, stabbed by Smyler and missing ever since. Was I hallucinating? Had I been in Hell so long my mind was crumbling? But the little bookkeeper wore an expression that must have been a mirror of mine—the slow dawning, the unlikely facts caught in the bottleneck of logic and unable to slide past.
“Yes,” he said, his words barely audible. “Yes! Walter Sanders. No. Vatriel. That’s my real name.” He looked around the cabin, then looked over Riprash, Gob, and me, blinking as he did so like a slow loris caught in a flashlight beam. “What am I doing here?”
“You don’t know?” Fat lot of good any of this was going to do me. Just more mysteries on top of the ones I already had and didn’t want. “You don’t remember?”
He was shaking his shaggy head when a crewman rapped on the cabin door, urging Riprash to come to the quarterdeck.
Walter and I were no closer to solving what had happened to him between his being stabbed by Smyler and taking a job with Gagsnatch’s Quality Slaves when Riprash shoved open the cabin door. “Trouble,” the ogre said. “Come up.” I’d scarcely ever seen him look worried, but now he really did, the great shelf of his brow frowning until his eyes were almost invisible.
Gob and I and Wart aka Vatriel aka Walter followed him up onto the deck. The shape on the horizon was so small and its lights so faint that it took me a long moment to realize it was a ship.
“What’s the ensign?” Riprash asked Gob. “Use those young eyes.”
Gob climbed up so he could lean out over the rail, then spent a half minute squinting into the foggy darkness. “Bird’s foot,” he said as he scrambled back down to the ogre’s side.
“Feared that,” said Riprash. “That’s the sign of the Commissar of Wings and Claws. It’s Niloch’s ship, The Headless Widow.”
I was frightened but didn’t want to show it. “Charming name.”
“Whole thing is Raping the Headless Widow, but that’s too long for most folks, ’cause they don’t want to talk about that ship much anyway. She runs on steam, she’s got something like twenty guns to our eight—and only two of ours work—and she’ll catch us by tomorrow or the next day, certain.”
I could see Niloch’s ship a little better now, a dark shadow hunkered low in the Stygian waters, its lanterns peering at us like eyes in the fog. I had hoped I’d burned the ugly, rattling bastard to ashes when I blew up his Gravejaw House, but hellish nobility are extremely hard to kill. And as I think I’ve mentioned, they’re also very serious about holding grudges. Apparently, the commissar had managed to get himself appointed to head up the Bobby Hunt. “Can we fight them?”