I joined the madness, taking my place in a line, passing sloshing pails of stinking Styx water from the bilge up to the masts. The best climbers were kept busy putting out the fires wherever the hell-pigeons struck, but even so, the mizzen sail was gone and the topsail almost entirely aflame, and only heroic work by the crew kept it from spreading to the other sails.
The flock finally thinned, but without the topsail we were losing ground even more swiftly. I squatted down on the deck beside Walter and struggled to catch my breath before the next wave of flaming birds.
Something pale flew past me, rattling. Another pale shape struck the mainmast behind us and fell to the deck, thrashing and snapping. It was a flying fish, or at least part of one—an almost fleshless skeleton. But the fact that it was mostly bones and empty eye sockets didn’t keep it from trying to sink its teeth into everything it could reach before it died. Several more flew past, then suddenly a whole flock or school or whatever you call it seemed to tumble down on us. Several of the crew putting out fires were knocked out of the rigging as if they’d been hit by bullets. They fell to the deck—I could hear bones breaking—so I grabbed Walter and dragged him back toward Riprash’s cabin. Gob was already there, hunkered down in the doorway, watching with wide eyes as the swarm of mummified fish smacked into the sails and deck.
Then, from out of the distance, I heard The Headless Widow’s cannons fire, a deep roar like sequenced thunder. They were still too far away to reach us, but it was an announcement of sorts: the end was coming, whether sooner or later.
“I have an idea,” I shouted to Gob and Walter over the yelling and screaming of the crew, many of whom were barely clinging to the ropes overhead as they dodged the toothy horrors. I asked Gob, “Can you sew?”
He looked at me like I’d asked an earthly teenager if the Macarena was still hip.
“No? Then find me someone who can. Walter, help me find some of these oilskins that are the right size.”
“What are you doing?” Walter asked as Gob sped off across the snapping, fishy chaos of the deck.
“They don’t want the rest of you, they want me. As long as I’m on this ship, they’re going to keep coming. But if I’m off it, well, I think they’ll follow me instead.”
He looked at the pile of skins collecting beside me. “What? Are you going to make a life raft? They’d catch up with you in an hour.”
“No, I’m not going to make a life raft. I’m going to try a little trick. I don’t know how much you remember yet about your old life, but on Earth they used to be impressed by someone walking on water.”
He stared at me in puzzlement. “You’re going to walk on water?”
“Better than that. I’m going to walk under the water.”
A few moments later Gob returned with what looked like one of the oldest members of the crew, a sailor named Ballcramp whose hell-body seemed to be formed from the least attractive elements of the concepts spider and beef jerky. The worthy fellow clearly thought I was insane when I told him what I wanted, but saw the benefits of working in the captain’s cabin, out of the murderous rain of fish. He arranged himself on the floor and took out a sewing kit wrapped in hide, with needles made of bone and thread made of gut.
I explained what I wanted and left him stitching oilcloths together under the supervision of Walter and Gob while I hurried across the deck with my arms over my head against the continuing flurries of animated fish bones. Riprash was down on the gun deck, trying to get the two workable cannons into firing position nearer the stern.
I told him my plan. Being a demon, Riprash didn’t waste any time arguing with me, even though it wasn’t very likely I’d survive. It was occasionally almost refreshing how few social niceties there were in Hell, how little time was spent pretending to care about things that nobody really cared about. Riprash had nothing against me, but he loved the Bitch, and he probably also thought that I’d just be recycled somehow if my body died. I didn’t bother to explain that dying would just be the fastest possible way to deliver myself into the hands of Niloch and the rest of Hell’s demon lords. Lameh’s instructions had made it very clear: Temuel’s arrangements could only get me back into my old body once he’d managed to extract me, and he could only extract me from one particular place, the far side of Nero’s forgotten bridge.
“So if it works, Niloch and his men should leave you alone,” I finished. “Can’t promise, but if they have to choose, I think they’ll choose me.”
“You’ll never make it,” Riprash said. “There are necks and black sinkers and a shit-swarm of big fang jellies in this part of the river. Any one of ’em will swallow you like a pickled eyeball.”
I didn’t even want to be swallowed like a regular eyeball. “Can you get me closer to the shore?”
“Not here. Can’t lose the current or they’ll be on us. But in a little while we’ll be past Bashskull Point where the Styx meets up with the Phlegethon at the edge of the Bay of Tophet. Water’s shallower, won’t be any fang jellies. Might be some hogsquid, but they’re not as bad. You know about them, right?”
To be honest, I didn’t really want to know about hogsquid or fang jellies or any of them. Everything already sucked so completely that some new bad information would have just pushed my situation past its current state of Zen-like perfect fuckery into something messy and overdone.
The Headless Widow was gaining on us, and when they fired their guns the white waterspouts of falling shells were now only a few hundred yards behind us. I stopped on the way back to Riprash’s cabin and picked up a cannonball of my own to carry off, adding the gunnery sergeant to the list of Hell-denizens who thought I was crazy.
I thumped the heavy iron ball down in a corner of the cabin and did my best to make it secure against the pitch of the ship; it was big enough to break bones if it started rolling. Then I went back to directing old Ballcramp. “Leave a hole here, at the corner,” I told the spindly creature.
He shook his shriveled head at this senseless order, but the undead flying fish were cracking against the outside of the cabin, and it was a lot nicer inside, so he said nothing.
“You’re both safer with Riprash,” I told Walter and little Gob as I strapped myself into the crude oilskin vest I’d had Ballcramp make. Puffed up with the air I’d just blown into it, it made me look a bit like the Michelin Man, but less svelte. A fair wind, one of the few bits of luck I’d had in this whole cursed trip, had kept us ahead of Niloch long enough to reach Bashskull Point, and I was determined to get off the Bitch before the commissar destroyed it.
“But they know this ship,” Walter said. “They know Gagsnatch’s stall, everything. We’ll never be able to go back to Cocytus Landing now!”
“Don’t matter,” said Riprash as he lifted me into the dinghy. “We’re not going back.”
“What do you mean?” As we talked I hurriedly tested the oilcloth of the vest to see if it was flexible enough, but my main concern was that the seams would give under the pressure: I didn’t have a huge amount of faith in the tar we’d used to seal them.
“It’s a sign, that’s all,” said Riprash. “Like I told you, I’ve been thinking on this, and I see it clear now. I’m to take Nagging Bitch and spread the Lifters’ word. We’ll go where we please, and every port will be our home.”
This sounded like a spectacularly bad idea. “The authorities, Eligor and Niloch and Prince Sitri and the rest—they’ll stamp on you like ants, Riprash. They’ll never let you get away with it.”
“Even the Mastema can’t be everywhere,” he said, surprisingly cheerful. “We’ll stop and spread the word, then move on. We’ll leave behind those as can keep spreading the word for us. Gob here can say the Lifters’ Prayer by heart already! Say it boy. Show him.”
The kid looked embarrassed (or fearful, it was hard to tell with Gob) but he stared at the deck and spoke in a quiet, very serious voice.