Happy Hour In Hell: Volume Two of Bobby Dollar (13 page)

All I’d had to do so far was keep myself moving forward and avoid obvious mistakes, but now I would be making contact with this guy Riprash, the demon I was supposed to give Temuel’s curious message. I would rather have gone straight for Caz, but I didn’t dare leave the Mule’s errand for later: I had a feeling that when it was time to leave Hell, I might be leaving in a hurry. So Sinners’ Market first, then, if I survived, on to Pandaemonium, the capital of Hell, a mere few hundred levels or so straight up, the demons and freaks getting thicker around me with every step.

It took us half a day to find the ford over one of the Cocytus’s last tributaries, a narrow spot where bug-plated demons pulled an ancient barge back and forth on ropes across the steaming river. When I couldn’t produce any money for the fare, one of them kindly offered to take Gob instead, but we settled on a small cup of my blood, which they acquired with the quick slash of a dirty blade. My demon-blood looked blacker than human blood, but that might just have been the weird light.

If I’d thought Abaddon was ugly, I was going to have to find a new word for Cocytus Landing, which looked like it had been discarded next to the river by some glacier with a grudge. You’ve heard of shantytowns, right? Well, Cocytus Landing was pretty much a shanty
city
, as cheaply and dangerously constructed as the meanest hovels of Abaddon but on a much grander scale, a monstrous, multilevel, walled slum centered on its river docks.

The first difference I noticed between this and Abaddon was the industriousness. Not everybody was working, of course, but a major chunk of the populace seemed to be doing
something
, whether hauling spiky logs on creaky wooden carts, or whipping the slaves and other beasts of burden who pulled those carts, or loading and unloading the bizarre ships that bobbed at anchor all along the docks. Visiting Heaven was like a century tripping on E, all laughing and singing and dancing and not caring or even remembering. Hell was gritty and dirty, but things actually worked. The damned made things, struggled for existence, struggled to avoid pain. They ate and shat and fornicated just like people. But they would suffer forever.

As we made our way along the river toward the walls, I watched a stunning variety of ships on their ways in and out of port. Many looked like they’d been turned into boats only as an afterthought, weird arrangements of canvas, wood, and what looked like bones that didn’t seem like they could possibly float. It struck me then that I hadn’t seen any technology more advanced than you could have found in a European city during the low Middle Ages. All work was done by the brute strength of laborers, occasionally aided by the power of water or fire. I saw water wheels spinning along several of the river’s branches, and buildings that might have been mills or foundries looming crookedly beside the wheels. I couldn’t help wondering if this technological embargo was a rule of the Highest or some bizarre quality of Hell itself.

At the city gates, we joined the crowd funneling past a couple of dozen squat, muscular demons from the Murderers Sect. These soldiers seemed to be examining the passersby carefully, so I dragged Gob into the shadow of a tall peddler’s wagon and we went through the gate that way, out of the driver’s sight but picking up bits of spilled rubbish and putting it back on the cart as if it was ours.

The streets of Cocytus Landing were almost as narrow as the most claustrophobic back rows of Abaddon, but many, many times more crowded, and not just with sullen slaves and demon overseers, either. Many of the creatures we saw seemed to live their lives right out in public, eating, drinking, fucking, and fighting, often in the middle of the street, while the rest of the city’s inhabitants just swept around whatever was going on, as if the squirming bodies were stones in the middle of a fast-flowing river. As I looked closer I noticed that the folk making themselves so free seemed to be the demonic overseers more than the damned, although it wasn’t always easy to tell which was which in that zoo of exotic, disgusting bodies.

We waded on through the ugly crush, past creatures with faces like sad turtles and bewildered insects, creatures with crippled bodies and skin covered with running sores, even a few things that were almost nothing
but
one large running sore. The entire city breathed screams and moans around us like the horns of a bad downtown rush hour. Just as I was convinced I couldn’t take another moment of it, I spotted a great pool of torchlight ahead of us that seemed to be the source of the loudest cries, and I guessed that must be our destination, Sinners’ Market, the place where slaves were bought and sold.

Just ignore this other shit and find Riprash
, I reminded myself, like I was calming a child.
Then you can go after Caz, remember? Just keep taking steps.

I could almost see her in front of me then, a small, shining thing against all the darkness of this dark place, and for a moment I was calm. I had something to do. All this horror was for a reason. I couldn’t afford to forget that.

Weirdly, as I thought of her, a noise rose above the caterwauling crowds, a thin thread of music, slow and mournful. It was a woman’s voice, or at least something female, and the wordless melody was so old and simple and arresting that I’m sure it had been sung beside some great river on Earth thousands of years ago and is probably still heard today; some ageless lament of women squatting in the muck beside the Indus or the Nile, washing their clothes. Here, it probably came from some toad-thing who had been in Hell so long she couldn’t remember the Euphrates mud between her toes, but somehow she still remembered the tune, and croaked it to herself as she patted together cakes of excrement to dry and burn for fuel.

It gave me chills. It was the most human thing I’d heard either in Hell
or
in Heaven, and for a moment I almost completely forgot where I was. Then somebody got angry and poked out someone’s eye right next to me, and the moment was over.

The Sinners’ Market is about as nice a place as it sounds. It’s largely held under the roofed perimeter of a ruined and ramshackle stone coliseum, although during my visit the huge open area in the middle was being used as well. What was sold in the market was . . . well, sinners, to be used as slaves.

Most of these shackled damned were already slaves, and would go from one kind of specialized slavery to another. But just because these were valuable possessions—many of whom had been trained to do specific jobs or even physically altered so they could do them better—didn’t mean they were treated well. I had been seeing how the ordinary folk of Hell treated each other, and it was truly horrifying, but now I was seeing what organized cruelty looked like, and the sheer weight of Hell as an institution suddenly became clear to me. I would see worse things in Hell, and God knows I’d suffer worse things, but nothing ever stepped on my spirit as badly as those first few minutes in the clanking, begging, wailing, and roaring of the Sinners’ Market. It was like coming to the end of some very long scientific article and then finding the summary:
The universe is shit.

We asked around about Riprash, and at last got an answer from a cold, cat-eyed female creature whose slaves all looked like children or other small, innocent things; as I walked past, they set up a pathetic wailing from their cages, pleading, barking, mewing. As the she-demon impatiently told me where to find Riprash, I couldn’t help noticing that Gob was keeping his eyes very focused for once, watching me and nothing else. Maybe the bruised and bleeding children in cages hit a little too close to home.

Halfway around the lopsided stadium bowl, we found the large stall the cat-thing had described. A crude sign declared, “Gagsnatch Bros., Dealers in Offal and Slaves.” I guessed that the Gagsnatch Brothers must be the single obese body with two arguing heads that were bickering with each other and several other demons at the rear of the stall. I didn’t want the owner, though, just his overseer, so I made my way through the crush of stinking bodies, doing my best to ignore what was actually going on as I looked for Temuel’s contact. It was kind of like a spy movie but with a lot more human feces.

I found my quarry attended by several smaller demons as he inspected a crew of newly arrived slaves, creatures whose humanity had been so thoroughly tormented out of them that they made no whimper and didn’t even look up, but just crouched in the dirt, wheezing. I couldn’t help thinking that if the infernal Adversary himself were defeated this afternoon, there would still be work here for a million angels for a million years just to begin to repair the damage. As it was, though, the Highest apparently wasn’t feeling too disposed to mercy, or the Adversary was truly beyond forgiveness. Either way, nothing was going to change here until the end of time.

Riprash was a massive ogre twice my size, with huge flat toes and fingers and a face that would have been phenomenally ugly even without the scar, which I’ll describe in a second. He was hairless except for bristling brows, with a smashed gourd of a nose and huge blocky teeth that looked like they could crush stone. But the scar was really something else, if “scar” is even the right word: Riprash had a gouge chopped into his head from temple to nose that had obliterated one eye and covered the socket with scar tissue. I say “chopped” because the weapon was still lodged in there—an ax blade, it looked like. I could see the dull chunk of metal resting right in the meat of the ogre’s brain, because the hole in his skull had never closed. You get the point. Riprash wasn’t pleasant to look at.

I waited until he stopped growling at his underlings. Two of them turned and scurried away, but the third hesitated. It was a hairy little thing like an upright and slightly pear-shaped cat, with an unpleasantly near-human face, and it was looking right at me—really getting an eyeful. Whatever its interest was, I had lots of reasons for not wanting attention, so I glared at the bug-eyed little thing in my best Hellish Nobility Offended kind of way until it got nervous and hurried after the others.

Riprash had noticed me. “What do you want?”

He didn’t sound either interested or friendly, but I wasn’t going to get uppity with the hired help, especially not help that weighed more than my car back home. Lameh’s implanted memories suggested I now looked or smelled (or whatever) like middling Hell nobility, a sort of white-collar demon. That meant I probably outranked this Riprash guy. Yeah, in theory. But he was the strong right hand of an important and rich slave merchant. The stall was one of the biggest at the market, long as a football field and crowded as an Arabian bazaar. He clearly didn’t feel any need to kowtow, and I took my cue from that.

“Talk faster,” he said. “Busy day.”

“If you’re Riprash, I need to talk to you.”

He gave me a look of calculated irritation, but didn’t fold me up like a dirty hankie, which is what he looked like he wanted to do. “So talk.”

“I think . . .” Nobody seemed to be paying attention to us, but if my message wasn’t as innocuous as it sounded, I wasn’t certain I wanted to take the risk of anyone even seeing me deliver it. “I need to speak to you in private.”

His thick lip curled. “Piss on you, my lord. If you’ve got a bribe to offer, talk to my master, not me. I won’t cheat on him, not for all the treasure and cooze in Pandaemonium.”

“No, no!” I said. “It’s not a bribe, it’s a message. And not for Gagsnatch.
For you
.” I did everything but waggle my eyebrows like Groucho to help him get the subtext. “I just think it would be safer . . .”

I was interrupted by shouting from behind me, voices raised above even the roar of Gagsnatch Brothers ordinary chorus of bellows and howls. As we turned to look, a scrawny demon dashed toward us from the nearest knot of workers, his batlike ears laid flat against his skull in alarm.

“Boss says look sharp, Master Riprash! Make sure everything’s on the up!”

“Why?” Riprash didn’t seem to have many other facial expressions besides Annoyed and Dangerous.

“The Commissar’s showed up of a sudden. He and his lot are poking their noses in all over. They’re going from stall to stall looking for somebody.”

“Commissar Niloch?” The ogre clearly wasn’t happy to hear it, and now I wasn’t happy either. The bat-eared minion skittered away to spread the word to other parts of the large establishment. “What in the name of Astaroth’s swinging udders is
he
up to? Old Flaps and Scratches usually doesn’t make a show of himself until later in the season when he comes for his tribute.”

Now the stir had become more general as a few helmeted Murderers Sect guards came swaggering into the stall at the far end. When I quickly turned away again, Riprash was looking at me. He must have seen the panic in my eyes.

“You don’t want to be seen by Murder Sect, do you?” His remaining eye roved from me to little Gob and back again. “Not a friend of the Commissar’s, I take it?”

I didn’t dare say a word, because almost anything I could say suddenly struck me as potentially the wrong thing. Heavily armed demon soldiers were shouldering into the stall in bunches now. The slavers and even the slaves had fallen silent, nobody wanting to attract attention, and there was no way I could walk out again unnoticed. This wounded giant had my immortal soul in his huge hands, and there was nothing more I could do.

“Over here, then.” Riprash folded a giant hand over my shoulder and shoved me into a stumbling trot toward the back of the stall, where all kinds of cages had been dumped. Most were empty, but one was so full of slaves that arms and legs stuck out between every bar, and even the growing sense of terror settling over Gagsnatch’s establishment had not stopped their quiet noises of pain. “These need to be washed. Nobody with sense will want to look for you there.” The ogre fumbled a huge key out of his ragged garment and threw open the door of the cage, dealt bonebreaking blows to the few prisoners foolish enough to try to leave, then shoved me in. Gob scrambled in on top of me. I say “on top” because there was literally nowhere else to go. The entire cage, not much bigger than an old-fashioned phone booth, was crammed with the hideous, filthy bodies of damned slaves. They were so beaten down I heard only a few snarls of complaint as I pushed as far into the middle as I could get. The two or three prisoners who had been displaced by my entrance were only too happy to move back to the bars and the comparatively fresh air to be found just outside of a slave cage in the middle of Hell.