I was in a neighborhood that I had passed through before, cramped streets between slumping mud-brick dwellings, a place full of misshapen, shuffling figures, where every breath was full of red dust, and the sounds of violence and suffering never stopped. But Abaddon was the first layer above the Punishment Levels, which made it a place of freedom—at least in comparison with what lay below, starting with the Suicide Forest and getting worse and then even worse and then unimaginably worse the lower down you went. The creatures here in Abaddon were suffering because they were in Hell, but they weren’t being actively tortured. These were the creatures the nobility of Hell shanghaied to use as slaves, the workers who performed Hell’s most disgusting labors, and served as cannon fodder (sometimes literally!) in Hell’s armies. They would have been the lowest of the low in all the universe, except for one thing—they still clung to a tiny bit of freedom, still made lives for themselves in the midst of horror. Some of them, like Riprash, even thought there might be something more for them someday, and dreamed impossible dreams of an end to torment—dreamed, perhaps, of an eventual taste of kindness. The things living here weren’t just damned monsters, they were also human souls.
Just when I was in danger of turning maudlin, I heard a horn echoing from the stony walls, along with the distant but still unpleasantly clear baying of hellhounds. The commissar and his men must have retreated when they saw what I’d done and hurried back to the station to climb up to Abaddon in a lifter. Which meant my feelings of relief were bullshit: they were close enough to catch me long before I reached the bridge. Time to run again.
My head felt like a smashed melon, and I could have sworn I was on my last legs. In any other circumstance I would have been, but I didn’t have the luxury of collapsing. I tried to recall every single thing Gob had shown me, every trick for getting quickly across Abaddon. I went right through the houses of the damned, I leaped from rooftop to rooftop like a comic book character—well, like an extremely tired, mostly one-handed comic book character—and took every shortcut I could remember, including one where I skittered down a crumbling wall with an immense, fire-belching pit beneath me instead of just the distant ground. Through luck and taking a few crazy chances, I managed to put enough distance between myself and my pursuers that the cries of the hellhounds grew faint, but I knew it wouldn’t last.
I finally reached a spot where the streets ended and the dark, empty outer passages began. I had no lantern, but I had been a long time in these lower reaches, and my demon eyes served me well.
I did my best to make the narrow passages behind me difficult for my pursuers, pulling down stone and other debris wherever I could. I’ll also confess to running down a few side-tunnels when the pursuit had fallen far enough behind me that I couldn’t hear them, then scenting the false trail by sprinkling it with my own piss before dashing back to my chosen path.
One of the problems with being in Hell, I realized as I darted through holes and across open places like a frightened rat, was that you could never really relax, never stop to think about what was going on. I’d learned that lesson the hard way from Vera’s house, where I did relax, precisely when I should have been thinking.
I might have chosen to come here, but it certainly hadn’t been because I thought it would be fun. Leaving Caz out of the equation for a moment, I tried to make sense of what had happened and what I’d learned, on the very off chance that I’d survive to do something about it.
The undead horror Smyler had told me he received his marching orders from Kephas him-or herself. Could that be possible? I’d assumed it was Eligor who so badly wanted me silenced, but now that I thought about it, Kephas had at least as much to lose as the grand duke if the feather that signified a secret deal between important angel and important demon fell into the wrong hands. But would a heavenly VIP like Kephas try to destroy another servant of Heaven, even an unpopular one like yours truly? Then again, I’d wondered for years if a high-ranking somebody had silenced my old mentor Leo, my top-kicker in CU Lyrae. How much harder was it to imagine that one of my bosses sent a dead murderer to shut me up?
But Kephas was only a disguise for what I guessed was a fairly powerful angeclass="underline" I still didn’t know who my real enemy might be. What good would it do to escape Hell and save Caz if I promptly got bumped off by my own side? Or even worse, got Sam’s whole Third Way thing pinned on me? My record didn’t look good: my best friend Sammariel had been working for the Third Way mutiny all along, but when I had a chance to nab Sam, I let him go. Then I’d gone on an illegal jaunt to the actual factual Inferno to rescue my demon girlfriend and had even made a deal with Eligor the Horseman, right in his own demonic palace. I mean, really—how much spin would Kephas need to make me look literally guilty as hell? Not much.
But if this wasn’t all some elaborate trick by Eligor (still a possibility) and it really had been Kephas who sent Smyler after me, not just on Earth but all the way to the place of eternal punishment, what could I possibly do about it? Until I knew who the enemy on my own team was, I was an easy target.
As I wearily stumbled through the bleak labyrinth on the edge of Abaddon, breaking occasionally into a desperate sprint when I found the strength, another realization crept over me. A very scary one—yes, even for a man fleeing hellhounds. The mysterious Kephas might very well be one of the five ephors investigating the whole Third Way affair, and also keeping a watchful, disapproving eye on Yours Truly. I wasn’t positive that Kephas was one of them, of course—there were literally thousands of angels in the hierarchy above me. But if I were a big-time archangel doing something huge and underhanded, I’d want to be on the committee investigating it, not only to interfere with the inquiry in subtle ways but also so that I’d realize if they were getting close to finding me out.
Karael was the toughest and scariest of the Ephorate, at least to me; he probably still had uniforms spattered with the blood of fallen angels from the Big One. But he also didn’t seem like the type to go setting up an angelic daycare center full of socialist ideals like the Third Way. The other four I didn’t really know very well, except for Anaita, with whom I’d had a brief, slightly strange conversation in the Hall of Judgement before Karael showed up. Made me wish we’d had a chance to talk longer. And although I still didn’t know why Terentia had been made leader of the Ephorate over the much better known Karael, I didn’t have any other information about her, bad or good, to move her up the list of suspects. Chamuel and Reziel I knew even less, although Reziel was interesting because he/she/it (or “se,” as angel speech put it) appeared to be sexless, just as Kephas had been, at least according to Sam.
Of course that didn’t really mean much, because any one of them was capable of creating an impenetrable disguise, so I’m sure if Reziel was the traitor, se could have made hermself appear as feminine as Tinker Bell or as masculine as . . . well, as Karael.
And now I had another mystery to wonder about: What was angel Walter Sanders doing in Hell? I couldn’t believe it was a coincidence that he’d been stabbed by the same guy trying to get me, and then just happened to wind up down here in Hell. Smyler claimed he was taking his orders from Kephas. Did that include an order to take Walter off the game board first? Walter had been wanting to talk to me back at the Compasses that night—was it something to do with all this? Then, of course, his “death” and banishment to the nether regions had wiped all that away . . .
It came to me so suddenly and so powerfully that I barely noticed the mists rising around my feet, which meant I was close to the bridge. I should have been capering with joy, but a new thought had blossomed like a nose-pimple on the morning of senior prom, and it would not be ignored, even at this triumphant moment.