Eternity? Really?
We began to see signs of life beside the gloomy, solitary flower-eaters and the endless mist.
The first evidence of civilization was that the faint track Gob had been following finally became something more substantial, a road trod through the swampy grasses and down to the stony soil. We began to see houses, too, although it’s ridiculous to use such a word to describe the mean little piles of reeds and stones. Perhaps the inhabitants lived off the flower-eaters somehow, robbed them or sold things to them. Perhaps they harvested flowers and sent them by boat up the crap-colored streams that were beginning to be more common. I didn’t know and I didn’t care, because now I could see the walls of a city in the distance, which had to be Cocytus Landing, and that was where the hard part of my journey would begin.
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.