“Ah,” he said. “Ah. That was good to hear. All thanks to you—” He paused, his brow fissuring as he realized. “I don’t know your name, master.”
“It’s Snakestaff.” This was the first time I’d told my demon cover-name to anyone but Gob, and I was watching to see if it meant anything. I only had Temuel’s word (and Lameh’s silent memories) that it hadn’t been used before. But the ogre didn’t seem to find it either surprising or familiar.
“My thanks, then, Snakestaff. May you be lifted.”
Which sounded better than most things that had been happening, so I nodded. “Okay, now what?”
He looked at me like a man woken up too quickly. “What? What do you mean?”
“I mean, do you mind if we get on our way? My servant and me? Thanks for hiding me from the commissar, but I have other errands I need to do in Pand—in the Red City, and that’s a pretty long walk.”
“Other errands?” He looked interested, but not in the cruel, hungry way you usually see demons look interested. “Others like me?”
“No.”
“Too bad that you have to go. You should meet some of the other Lifters. Your message will mean a lot to them.” His terrifying face grew almost cheerful. “Wait! I am bound to deliver those slaves to the commissar at Gravejaw. If you go with me on the Bitch you’ll travel much faster, and you can find a lifter when you get there. That should speed your journey to the Red City.”
All this talk of lifting and lifters and bitches had me boggled, but I was not going to look this particular gift ogre in the mouth. “You mean you’d really help me?”
“I would do any service I could.” He spoke with a strange weight to his words. “Can’t you guess what your message means to me and mine?”
I couldn’t, not really, but clearly it meant a lot, and I was going to do my best to ride that wave all the way to the beach. “Yes, of course.”
“I ask only one favor in return.”
Shit, I thought, here it comes. Does he want to drink some of my blood, or eat one of my eyes? “And that is . . . ?”
“Tonight you must come with me to fellowship.”
Not quite as bad as I’d feared, obviously. “Certainly. But I still don’t understand. How will you get me to Gravejaw so much faster than I could walk?”
He laughed. “By boat, of course—my ship, The Nagging Bitch. Otherwise it would take you a hundred lanterns or more. But on Cocytus’ broad back, we’ll be there in nine.”
Well, thank you, nasty, foul river, I thought. I guess you’re not all bad.
Obviously, I still had a lot to learn.
The fellowship meeting, as Riprash called it, took place in a spot so disgusting it’s a miracle I remember the actual meeting at all. You’ve never really been in a sewer until you’ve been in a sewer in Hell. This one was made of what looked like mud brick, and smelled like . . . well, there just are no words for it. If I hadn’t been wearing a demon body, I suspect my sinuses would have committed suicide on first contact with that nose-scorching odor of death and shit and shit and death.
Still, bad smells were nothing compared to being caught by one of the gangs of Murderers Sect guards who patrolled the waterfront, so Riprash’s fellowship meetings were always held deep in the tunnels. It was ridiculously crowded with two dozen of us perched on the edge of a drainage culvert, but everybody just squeezed up as close as they could, because even in Hell, even among those being punished for all eternity, nobody wanted to go splashing around in that stuff.
I really did find it kind of touching that all these condemned souls as well as the demons meant to torment them (damned only outnumbered demons in that sewer about three to one) should come together in search of something bigger and better than what they knew. And Riprash himself, as it turned out, impressed me even more.
He was clearly the main dude, at least here in Cocytus Landing, and it showed. When he began to speak, even the poor damned guy covered entirely in shivering porcupine quills did his best to be quiet and listen.
“Once upon a time, back in the World, there was this fellow named Origen.” Riprash pronounced it like an Irish name—O’Ridgeon. “And he had a big idea: Nobody has to stay damned forever. Nobody.”
A few of what must have been the newer members of the congregation looked startled and whispered to each other.
“That’s right.” The ogre spoke slowly, as if for children. “Not even the Adversary himself has to remain in Hell for eternity. Even he can lift himself up. Lift himself up! And so can we.”
“But what good will it do?” demanded a creature with a head like a skinned donkey. “Those angel bastards will just push us back down anyway. They’ll never let us out!”
A few others murmured their agreement, but Riprash was clearly an old pro at this sort of thing, and tonight he had a better than usual answer.
“If you think so,” he said, “then you’ll be very interested to hear the message this fellow brought to me today.” He pointed at me and several of the creatures in the sewer turned to look. “He brought me a message from,” he dropped his voice to a near-whisper, but even an ogre whisper was pretty loud, “from that other place. The up-high place. Where those angels live who you think only want to push you back down. And what did the message say? What did the message sent all the way down here from the other place say, Master Snakestaff?”
He was clearly waiting for me. “‘You are not forgotten,’” I quoted.
“That’s right! So think of that. I don’t say that all the Halos love us, because they don’t. But there are some as know what’s done to us wasn’t right. And if we keep trying to do it, well, we can lift ourselves up, just you wait and see!”
Riprash went on like this for a while more, then asked if any of the fellowship wanted to give testimony. I had thought I would be bored and restless, as I would have been in any religious meeting back on Earth, but instead I was fascinated. The first one to speak was a damned soul that looked more than a bit like a gingerbread man made out of moldy, ancient paper. He explained carefully that when he had lived on Earth he had been a thief in Antioch, and that although he had only stolen food to feed his starving family, he had been put to death by the Roman overlords and condemned to Hell.
“It’s good news to hear we might be free again someday,” he said in a slow, serious tone. “Good news. And I will do all I can to behave myself and learn the way to do that. Because I want to be free. It wasn’t fair, what happened to me. And when I’m free again, I will go find that shit-eating merchant who called the guards on me, and my bitch of a wife who didn’t even come to see me executed, and all the bastards who did come, and I’ll cut them all into pieces.” He might have been reading a laundry list. He’d been thinking about it a long time.
“Not sure you really grasp the details of the thing, fellow,” said Riprash gently as the gingerbread thief sat down again on the ledge above the stinking flood. “Not about revenge, this. About making ourselves better than we were.”
“I’ll feel better when that stinking merchant is dead,” the gingerbread man muttered, but already somebody else had risen to speak. This damned soul was female, although that wasn’t clear when she first stood up, because she looked more like a person-shape made of overcooked spaghetti, with eyeballs tucked into the tangle in place of meatballs. For a moment she stood, hesitating, winding her tendrils with equally limp fingers.