Again, the lack of tear ducts kept me from making a blubbering fool out of myself. I still wasn’t sure whether I’d helped the boy or doomed him by bringing him up out of Abaddon, but it was too late to change anything now. “Keep safe, Gob. Riprash will take good care of you.”
The boy nodded. I don’t know whether he would have thanked me in any case, but people didn’t do much thanking in Hell, as you may have noticed, and we were also surrounded by gouts of white water as Niloch’s guns began to find our range, so things were a bit hectic.
“And Walter, I’ll get you out of here. Somehow.” I felt like an idiot even as I said it—so many promises, so few fulfilled. But Walter was too polite, even as a demon, to tell me how unlikely that was. Instead he just waved like a kid watching his older brother going to the gallows.
Riprash began lowering the dinghy into the water, manning the ropes all by himself. “I put a flask of rum in that vest of yours, Snakestaff. You’ll need it, I think. And tell you-know-who back in you-know-where that I’ll spread the word all over the Inferno!” he bellowed.
Was that really what Temuel wanted? It didn’t matter, because that was what he was going to get. We never know what a gesture or a word will lead to, do we?
“God loves you!” I called. It was what we angels say to the recently deceased. I was pretty sure none of these folks had heard it since then, and some of them like Riprash had probably never heard it at all.
“Bobby!” Walter leaned over the rail, and would have fallen when a cannonball landed close enough to rock the ship, but Gob caught at his legs and kept him from tumbling. “I just thought of something. The voice! I remember the voice!”
“What voice?” I could barely hear him over the wind and the barking of the Headless Widow’s guns.
“The voice that asked me about you.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
“I’m not sure either, but I think it’s important. It was a child’s voice. A sweet, child’s voice . . . !”
My boat splashed hard into the water, and for the next moments I was busy trying not to fall into the river. The waves beaten up by the wind had seemed much smaller from on board the Bitch than in the little dinghy. I could hear Riprash bellowing for the rowers to start pulling, and the slave ship began to move away from me. I think the sight of my boat being put into the water had confused Niloch and his crew. The Widow’s guns fell silent, though the black bulk of the ship continued to bear down on me.
I’m sure the commissar and his crew expected me to start rowing, but in fact I hadn’t bothered to bring any oars—no point to it, as you’ll see. I watched Nagging Bitch pull away, and for the first time I felt how truly alone I was.
Niloch and his crew obviously suspected some kind of bomb or other trap, so when they were thirty or forty yards away from me they disengaged their engines and let the ship drift with the same current pushing my little boat. Many sailors and soldiers looked down through the clouds of steam that drifted from the Widow’s smokestacks.
Seen this close, Niloch looked even less pleasant than I remembered. A lot of his bone tendrils had simply burned away or broken off, and for the first time I could see that his skeletal head was more like a bird’s than a horse’s.
“You!” he screeched, “Snakestaff, you miserable turdling! Why do you look so puffed up? Whatever armor you’re wearing under that won’t save you from me. You destroyed my home.”
“Gosh,” I called back, “maybe because you were going to torture me and then turn me over to your superiors?”
“Nobody may flout authority,” Niloch screeched. “Least of all a speck of dirt like you, a creature with no level, no land, no loyalty . . . !”
“Honestly, I’m not listening,” I said. “You’re as boring as you are ugly.” I looked around to make sure that Nagging Bitch was still on the move, that Riprash and the rest were putting distance between themselves and Niloch’s larger ship. Then I bent down and picked up the heavy iron sphere from the bottom of the dinghy.
“Do you know what this is?” I asked.
Niloch tittered in surprise. “A cannonball.”
“Wrong. Try again.”
He scowled, a strange thing to see on such a long, bony face. “A bomb? Go ahead, little traitor. Destroy yourself—you won’t hurt us. This ship is iron-plated.”
“It’s not a bomb, either. It’s just a weight.” I balanced for a moment with my foot on the boat’s rail, just until I could tuck the heavy iron ball into the harness I wore across my belly, then I stepped off the boat and the cannonball yanked me down into the oily, caustic waters of the Phlegethon.
thirty-eight:
chained
I’M SURE I would have had to pay extra on any package tour of Hell for the thrill of sinking to the bottom of the Phlegethon River—“swim with the friendly fang jellies!”—but to be honest, I was more intent on surviving than getting the most out of the experience. Actually, surviving probably was getting the most out of the experience.
I spent the first few seconds pulling the bone cork out of the air sack on my vest, then getting the opening into my mouth so I could breathe. Shallowly, of course: the air inside had to last until I could reach land, which also meant I had to outlast any pursuit from the Widow. I looked up. The eyes of my demon-body were very adaptable to low light and, luckily, the Phlegethon wasn’t as dark as the Styx. Even so I could barely make out the hull of Niloch’s ship far above me, in a circle of sky. I could see all right, but the Phlegethon wasn’t always bursting into flame by accident: its waters made my eyes sting and irritated my nose something fierce. Still, so far so good. The cannonball was heavy enough to keep me on the bottom despite the buoyancy of the oilskin air sack.
Things swam past me in the murk, some of them quite depressingly solid, serpentine forms like huge eels or something fished out of Loch Ness, but others that were scarcely more than dark streaks in the water or cold currents with a definable shape. I didn’t see any of Riprash’s fang jellies close up, but I saw something large in the dark distance that looked like a floating circus tent trying to fold and unfold itself as it floated along. I didn’t waste much time thinking about it or any of the others, because it seemed obvious to me that the bottom of a river in Hell wasn’t likely to be a safe place. The only thing I could do to improve my odds was get to land as soon as possible.
As elsewhere in Hell, the animal life was as distorted and depressing as the more complex creatures. As I reached the bottom and began to trudge slowly across the mud in what I believed was the general direction of shore (and if I was wrong I was going to be in serious trouble) I found myself stepping carefully around spiny things that could have been sea urchins if they hadn’t been in a river and five feet wide. Flat, disklike crabs with disturbingly human faces skittered in and out of the rocks on the bottom, sending up little puffs of silt as they dodged away from predators that were little more than toothy jaws with fins. Once I stopped, despite my limited amount of air, and waited while a vast shadow passed right over me with a slow flick of its tail. I couldn’t see it clearly, but it was covered in bony plates and had a mouth big enough to swallow Bobby Dollar and a few other folk at the same time. I had no illusions that I’d be able to outswim or outfight it—the thing was the size of a school bus—so I just hunkered down. It was a long wait, but at last the living submarine moved on, and I could continue. Later I think I even saw a hogsquid, which truly did look a bit like a my friend Fatback in his pig form, if Fatback was as big as the payload of a tanker truck and had twenty-foot tentacles growing out of his mouth. Fortunately for me, the ugly bastard was too busy rooting up and swallowing doomed creatures from the murky river bottom to notice me.