“You know what this is?” asked Spyder.
“I’m not blind,” said the creature. “It’s the black blade, hungry for death, even among the dead.”
Spyder pressed the knife harder into the thing’s throat. “Are you the little prick who snatched my blindfold?”
“Why would I do that? You talking meat are vile enough as spirits. Who wants you alive down here, eating and defecating and breathing your foul stenches into the air?”
Spyder withdrew the knife, but kept it by his side. The creature clumsily crawled onto its tiny feet.
“Who are you?” asked Shrike.
The creature proudly drew itself up to its full height of about four feet. “I am Ashbliss, servant and valet to his Divine Abhorrence, the Lord of Flies, Beelzebub.”
“Why were you spying on us?”
“This is my day off. I often come here to play about with lost souls. They make funny noises.”
“Fuck off, pink boy,” said Spyder, “before I carve my initials in your ass just to see what kind of funny noises you make.”
“You don’t want to do that. I’m here to help you,” said Ashbliss. “You’re the Painted Man.”
“Who?”
“Modesty is such a bore. But I know about you, and you need my help. You’re here for the book, aren’t you?”
“How do you know that?”
“The same way I know who you are. You’re here because you have to be. It’s all been foretold. You’re not the first champion to come this way. You’re not the first talking meat to come for the book. This beach and the roads of Hell are paved with the bones of the champions who came before you.”
“How can you help us?” asked Shrike.
“I can take you to where you want to go. To the book.”
“Why would you do that?”
“Because I want a small favor in return,” Ashbliss said. “You’re brave and you have the black knife, the blade that empties all vessels of life. I want to be free of my master. True, his cruelty is boundless and his depravity is deeper and darker than the chaotic void that lies between Heaven and Hell.” Ashbliss looked at his feet over his round belly and shrugged his tiny shoulders. “My problem is that I know all his terrors and his tirades. He’s a bore.”
“So, you’re a demon, huh? How’s that working out for you?” asked Lulu.
“I enjoy my work. I don’t enjoy my master. He’s—”
“A bore. We picked up on that,” said Spyder. “Everything bores you, doesn’t it?”
“I’m hopelessly corrupt,” Ashbliss said, smiling. “It’s my nature.”
“Thanks for the offer, but we know the way,” said Shrike.
“So did they.” Ashbliss spread his little hands indicating the expanse of bones at their feet. “And anyway, you’re lying. I, on the other hand, know shortcuts. Secret paths. Passages that only a being such as myself can navigate.”
“Truth is, I’d rather wander aimlessly than take the word of you and your horse dick,” said Spyder.
“I understand. You’re proud and strong. You’re the Painted Man.”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
The demon giggled. “I know your voices now,” Ashbliss said. “When you need me—and you will need me—just call my name. I’ll hear you anywhere in the underworld.”
“Don’t wait by the phone.”
“To show good faith, I’ll give you something for free.” He pointed at two low hills in the distance. That path between the hills, were you going to take it to enter the Plains of Dis beyond?”
“That was the plan,” Shrike lied.
“Yes, lots of lazybones try that route,” said Ashbliss gravely. “Do not, under any circumstances, follow that impulse. Sulfur fumes rise from old mine shafts and mix with the damp fog that drifts down from the cliffs above. The air itself turns to acid. Even my kind shun the place. Go to the southwest, near the old library in the Forest of Lies.”
“The Forest of Lies?” said Spyder.
Ashbliss sighed, mumbling, “Fools,” under his breath. With a small gesture, he pulled a pen and sheet of vellum out of the air. The demon scratched away at the vellum for a few minutes and tossed it to Spyder.
“A map,” said the demon. “That information is free. The next will cost you.” He bowed, dribbling wax onto the bone shards at his feet. “Feel free to go back to your lust. I promise not to look. And enjoy your journey.” With a jaunty wave, Ashbliss waddled away down the beach.
FORTY-SIX
THE DAMNED AND THE GENTRIFIED
Spyder slipped on the remains of his jacket and followed the others.
They went along the route indicated on Ashbliss’ map. Every step of the way, they crunched over the bones of other adventurers who had come for the book, but none of them talked about this. Spyder and Lulu led Shrike through tricky fields of loose rock. Looking after each other gave them all something to do, and the contact was reassuring.
“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” said Shrike. “It wasn’t supposed to go this way. You’re trapped down here, Spyder, and I don’t know how to help you.”
“Then it’s best not to dwell on it,” he said. Shrike reached out for him, but he walked on ahead, describing the scene to her.
“We’re going through a slit canyon. The light is grasshopper green. There are strata of some pale orange and turquoise rock that glows like glass lit from the inside. Along the top of the canyon are the ruins of buildings. They’re pretty crude rock and clay shells. They may be some of the first things the angels built when they landed here. No one’s used them in a long, long time. The canyon walls are covered in sigils, the magical symbol for each angel’s name. I recognize a few. Baal. Pillardoc. Azazel. Salmiel. Beelzebub. Lucifer’s sigil is just ahead. It’s huge. The size of a whole cliffside. That hellhound took a great big whizz to mark his territory.”
When they reached the spot on the map indicating that they should circumvent the Plains of Dis, Shrike stopped. It was on the wind: the faint, but unmistakable rotten egg stench of sulfur. Spyder checked the map and turned them to the southwest, as Ashbliss had advised. “This way,” he said. They turned off the road and headed overland, through thick, thorny bushes, following the demon’s map.
Soon, they came to the Forest of Lies, where things were seldom as they first appeared. Paths turned to dust underfoot. A bare tree sprouted vicious thorns when Lulu leaned on it to remove a stone from her shoe. The sickly, brooding birds that nested in the twisted branches murmured to them trying to break their spirits.
“She cares nothing for you. She wants the book. The power. When she has that, she’ll leave you like all the others.”
“You killed your father. With your treachery and lust, you took the snake into your bed and set him loose in your home.”
“They still suspect you. They will abandon you here and return to the world and laugh about your torment while they fuck.”
The deserted library in the Forest of Lies was an ancient wreck. Its doors and windows were long gone and the pages of its books blew through the woods like the ghosts of dead leaves. Spyder picked up the some of the papers that wrapped around his legs and snagged overhead in the trees. There were love notes, suicide notes, tax returns, forged money, old treaties embossed with government seals, lottery tickets, doctored photos, newspaper articles and religious texts.
They passed from the Forest of Lies into the Valley of Lost Desire. The place was eternally shrouded in a thick fog and lovers wandered through the gray desolation hearing each other’s calls, but never finding one another. Ash from a nearby volcano drifted down into the valley, making the fog worse. It looked as if the volcano had erupted sometime in the recent past. Hard-baked bodies lay strewn across the valley floor, like a museum exhibit about the destruction of Pompeii. It wasn’t until Spyder tripped over one of the heavily ashed corpses and heard a steady scraping from inside that he realized that the crusted forms each contained a trapped soul. Spyder tried cra
cking open a few, but the rocks he used always shattered without making so much as a crack in the stony prisons.
They passed from the Valley of Lost Desire into an overheated swamp that on the map was marked only as Rage. Faceless souls chased and savagely beat other souls in waist-high bogs of boiling blood. Once each attack had been accomplished and the victim beaten senseless or drowned, the victim and attacker would exchange roles and the whole process would begin again. The souls didn’t seem to notice Spyder and the others as they inched by on a narrow ledge. They were grateful to make it out of Rage without incident.
They passed from Rage into the frozen Plains of Misery. The sullen, suicidal and malicious, who took nothing from existence but pain and who made others’ lives as empty and excruciating as their own, lay half in ice, cursing and trying not to look at each other. As they went, Spyder looked down and saw other souls completely submerged in ice, swallowed up by the diamond-blue glacier that inched back and forth across the scarred open land.
They passed from the frozen Plains of Misery into the overgrown Fields of Greed. Souls dug enormous golden thorn bushes from the rocky soil with their bare, bleeding hands and tried to carry them away, only to have the bushes stolen by other souls, driven mad by avarice.
When they tried to carry too many at once, souls ended up buried beneath piles of golden thorns. Others ripped their ghostly bodies to shreds as they fought frantically for the bushes with other souls. A bleeding woman fell at Lulu’s feet and when she tried to help the wounded soul, the woman tried to bite Lulu. She clutched a small collection of golden thorns to her breasts, cutting herself to the bone. “You keep away,” the woman told Lulu. “These are mine.”
When they were finally through the Fields of Greed, the skyline of an enormous city glistened in the distance. “Pandemonium,” said Spyder who, despite himself, felt a little shuddering thrill inside as he spotted the place. The city possessed a brutal but elegant beauty, as if the Manhattan skyline had been dropped into the city of the biggest oil refinery in the world.
What puzzled Spyder, however, was the city that lay just beyond Pandemonium. Though the other city was farther away, it towered over Hell’s greatest metropolis, dwarfing its tallest towers. The graceful mother-of-pearl domes and minarets of this other city shimmered in the light from an artificial sun that was suspended by some magical force high over the place. In the false but dazzling light, the buildings appeared to be trimmed in gold and silver and inlaid with precious stones. Construction cranes huddled silently at the edges of the bright city.
“That looks brand new,” said Spyder.
“Shit,” said Lulu. “Demon condos. Yuppies’ll even gentrify Hell.”
FORTY-SEVEN
MISS FUCKIN’ MANNERS
According to the map, they were at a place called the Razor Pits of Merry Vengeance.
Only there were no pits and no razors. Just a cracked alkali plain whose surface had been scraped flat sometime in the not too distant past. Mounds of crystallized mineral salts and dry soil dotted the plain where they’d been left and never removed.
“Are you sure?” asked Spyder. “We’ve been off the path for a long time. Maybe we’re lost.”
“I know exactly where we are,” said Shrike. “Things are just different.”
“So what?” said Lulu. “Shit changes. Those carts over the Bone Sea weren’t always there, right? The devil’s building Barbie’s Dream Hell House. Big deal. Pandemonium’s right over there and so’s the book. What are we going to do about that?”
“Go and get it, I suppose,” said Spyder.
“Just walk in?” Lulu asked.
“We hadn’t really worked out a plan yet.” He sat down by one of the alkali piles.
“No shit, Dr. No. And under a cloak of darkness isn’t going to cover our asses ’cause this place is nothin’ but a cloak of darkness.”
“Shrike, what do you think?”
“We need to know what’s ahead of us. And I only trust that demon so much. He could be leading us into a trap or a dead end just for his own amusement.”
“Well, I don’t see a Chamber of Commerce to get a new map.”
“One of us is going to have to go into Pandemonium, take a look at Lucifer’s palace and see if the book is really there.”
“I hate this plan.”
“If he has the book, it should be easy to find. Lucifer will probably have it on display, a war trophy. Do you think there will be many guards?”
“How should I know?”
“You’re our Hell expert.”
“Let me tell you, this place isn’t exactly like the books said. But, I guess, the psychology’s the same.”
“How does that help us?” asked Lulu.
“There’s this old story about Vlad the Impaler, this kill-crazy Romanian prince. He’s the guy Dracula is based on,” Spyder said. “More than anything, this guy loved killing Turks, and he loved killing them by impaling them on long wooden poles. He’d stake whole fields with thousands of dead and dying Turkish POWs. Everyone was afraid of ole Vlad. A story goes, that he left a golden goblet by a waterfall on the road to his city, a place where travelers could get a cool drink on the long road. This goblet was worth a lifetime’s wages for anyone in his kingdom. But people were so afraid of this psycho that no one ever stole the goblet. They didn’t want to end up like one of those Turks.”
“Thanks for taking us there, bro. But what the fuck does that mean?”
“Vlad left the goblet so people could get a drink. He also wanted to prove what a badass he was.”
“There won’t be any guards at all,” said Shrike.
“That’s my guess,” said Spyder. “Lucifer knows no one has the balls to steal from him. I bet the place is going to be wide open.”
“Who’s going to find out?” Lulu asked.
Before any of them could respond, there was a sound. Deep, ponderous and rhythmic, like diesel engines the size of mountains driving wheels the size of skyscrapers. Spyder climbed to the top of the alkali mound and peered carefully over the top.
“What is it?” asked Shrike.
It was an army. At least, that was Spyder’s best guess. There were demons and damned souls marching onto the plain to Spyder’s right. They were clad in armor. Or maybe not armor, he decided. Machinery? Parts of the souls were definitely machine-like. In fact, some were variations on the spider machine they’d seen back at the Bone Sea. Others were Frankenstein patch jobs, trailing long umbilicals attached to still larger machines driven by demons.
“Lulu, tell me you’ve still got your shotgun,” said Spyder.
“An armed society is a polite society and I’m Miss-fuckin’-Manners.”
“I take it we’ve been found out,” Shrike said.
“Found out, sold down the river and the river frozen over.”
“You’ve got the magic knife. Think what Shrike and I have’ll stop these demons?” asked Lulu.
“I doubt it. But if they’re going to snuff us, I want to send a few home with bad dreams.”
“Wait a minute,” said Spyder. He shifted position on the mound. “Fuck.”
“What is it?” asked Lulu.
“Déjà-fucking-vu.”
“What?” asked Shrike.
“Remember that nightmare you had in the desert? The one we both had? With the chariot?”
“Of course.”
“We’ve got the director’s cut about to go down right in front of us,” Spyder said. He slid down the mound. “That Hell army isn’t for us. It’s for your friend, Xero.”
“Did you see him?”
“I saw a gold chariot, leading a shitload of souls and demons from the opposite side of the field. They were too far away to see any details.”
“My father,” said Shrike. “What was pulling the chariot?”
“Same as his army. Souls and demons.”
“One of those souls is my father.”
From across the plain, came a thundering war cry. Spyder
and Lulu crawled around the side of the mound.
“What’s happening?” asked Shrike.
Another mad shout.
“They’re just yelling and tossing shit at each other. Getting the troops worked up.”
“The man in the chariot, what does he look like?”
“He’s wearing a helmet. I can’t see his face. But he’s tall and ballsy. He’s shouting something at the Hell army and his boys look ready to chew bullets.”
“Xero was a fine general. He fought beside his men. Even when he sent them off to slaughter, they loved him.”
“I knew a pimp like that back in Houston,” said Lulu.
“Something’s happening,” Spyder said.
At some unseen signal, both armies surged forward. They slammed together with the sound of a crashing jumbo jet. Xero drove his chariot into the middle of the massacre, spearing demons and souls with an enormous longbow that never seemed to lack for arrows. When shafts hit his enemies, they didn’t just skewer them, but went clear through, gutting one opponent, then taking out the one behind, as well.
Shrike charged around the mound, past Spyder. “Father!” she screamed. “I’m here! It’s Alizarin!”
Spyder grabbed Shrike’s shoulder and pulled her back, as much to shut her up as to comfort her.
“I can’t stay here. I have to fight,” said Shrike.
“No problem,” Spyder said. “As of now, we got both sides coming at us.”
“Good,” said Shrike. She stood, brought up her sword and climbed to the top of the mound.
“Xero Abrasax, the men you betrayed took your head,” she shouted, “And I, Alizarin Katya Ryu, the woman you betrayed, is here to take it again!”
“Tell ’im, girl,” shouted Lulu. She and Spyder both ran from the mound as the few first few soldiers from Xero’s army reached them. Shrike was already in the air, doing a perfect somersault and slashing the throats of three demons as she landed. As Spyder slashed away with the black knife, he saw that Shrike’s left arm was streaked with blood. She’d called up some kind of magic before leaping into the fray. It must have been heavy because her own blood splattered on the ground with the demons’ as she split them open with her sword.