Riprash thumped toward us and spread his massive arms. “This . . . this is freedom,” he said, conveniently ignoring the shrieks of the damned in their cages below. “No master but the winds and the tide. When I felt this, I was first lifted. But I did not even know it then.” He laid a huge paw on my shoulder; if he’d pushed down, I’m pretty sure he could have driven me into the deck like a finishing nail. “Perhaps you come to another fellowship with me, Snakestaff? When we reach Gravejaw, maybe?”
I mumbled something noncommittal. I’m not really a joiner, but out of curiosity I asked, “How many are in your fellowship?”
“Ah, it is not as small as it was back in that other day, when your master first spoke to me. More join every day. Still, we are few.” He nodded. “But we are lifted, in our thought if not in our bodies.”
I never found out where he picked up the Origen stuff, but he had a pretty good understanding. Origenes of Alexandria was a Christian scholar, back in the third century or so, who proposed that if free will and forgiveness were real, even Satan himself had a chance someday to make peace with the Highest and achieve forgiveness. Needless to say, the early church stomped all over this idea, because they thought a Hell that wasn’t forever was pretty toothless. Plainly, many of those early Christians had never spent centuries dogpaddling in molten lava, or they would have rethought that concept; even a mere decade of constant, agonizing burns might adjust attitudes, I’d guess.
I was impressed by Riprash’s belief, and I speak as a confirmed cynic. Gob was interested too, or at least I guessed that he was, because he listened carefully when the ogre spoke.
“But the lords of Hell . . . they can’t like that idea very much,” I said at last.
“And they don’t, that’s a fact.”
I couldn’t help thinking that my supervisor Temuel was playing a pretty dangerous game, encouraging the rank and file of Hell to start thinking about salvation. Did our superiors have any idea? Because it sounded like just as revolutionary and dangerous a plan as Sam’s mystery-angel Kephas had hatched with the Third Way, which I was already trying to wipe off my shoes. Bobby Dollar sneaking off to aid a religious rebellion in Hell wasn’t going to make the Ephorate any happier with me. Not that I wasn’t already fucked before I got here; I had slept with a high-ranking demon, helped a rogue angel (who happened to be my best friend) escape, bashed another angel over the head while he was pursuing his lawful duties, and then lied to Heaven about all of it.
Slam dunk, I believe our friends in the earthly legal profession would call the case against me.
Riprash sang in a voice like a slow avalanche.
Yeah. Why worry about one more strike against me at this late date? In fact, as long as I was down here in Hell, I decided I should look around for a nice piece of property, because the odds were high I was going to be coming back soon on a more permanent basis.
seventeen:
gravejaw house
THE RIVER was as horrible and dangerous as you’d imagine, full of skeletal pirates on leaking rafts and fanged serpentine creatures big as slimy commuter trains. But we were on a large, well-armed boat, and the nightly tales of Sinbad the Split-Skull Sailor almost made up for the stench and the constant terror that something was going to eat us.
Riprash had started out in the service of a demon lord named Crabspatter and worked his way up to a position of responsibility in the guy’s personal guard, until Crabspatter was cut to ribbons by another, badder demon in a sea battle at a place Riprash called Sucking Marsh.
“Old Crabby went down to the bottom with a spear through his guts, yes he did,” said Riprash in the nostalgic tone of someone talking about a dotty uncle. “He’s probably still down there, trying to get out of the mud—he was a mean fucker. That’s when I got this.” He reached up and touched the huge gash in his head. “And then I woke up, stripped and robbed of everything, chained in a line of captives. The winner kept some of us, sold the rest.” He laughed. “Not surprised he didn’t keep me. My head didn’t stop bleeding for months.”
But the slave trader who bought him recognized Riprash’s quality, or at least his immense size, and put him to work as an overseer. Freedom is kind of a moot point in Hell, apparently, and Riprash was never granted his, but he worked his way up to positions of greater trust until he was the slave trader’s right-hand man. Centuries later, Gagsnatch took over the trader’s business (neither a gentle nor a legal transaction, from what I could tell) but he kept Riprash in the same position of trust, and my new chum had worked for Gagsnatch ever since. He gave me a startled look when I asked him how many years ago that had been.
“Years? Words like that don’t mean anything much here. Some of the new ones come in and they ask how long this, how long that, but the rest of us find it doesn’t do any good to think about it.”
It made me wonder how many years Gob had been a child, scuttling through the narrow alleyways of Abaddon. The kid had been born in Hell, but time here didn’t seem to mean much, and Gob didn’t remember much beyond a few days back, probably because, until he hooked up with me, it had all been pretty much the same.
I was beginning to see that the whole Hell thing, including the timelessness, had been craftily arranged to make the inmates as unhappy as possible. They had to scramble for food and shelter every day, but other than that, things hardly ever changed—or changed just enough to make the repeated doses of punishment more painful. If things are always the same, you get used to them. If they change, if sometimes they get a little better, that makes the return to misery all the more painful. So if any of you plan to open your own Hell, remember this time-tested recipe: Vary the suffering so your victims don’t get completely numb. Show them something better from time to time, just to keep them hoping.
I couldn’t help wondering whether Riprash’s fellowship, the Lifters, might actually be part of the infernal master plan. After all, what better way to insure suffering than to wave a little hope for better days in front of the damned and the doomed? Riprash didn’t believe that, though, and I certainly wasn’t going to argue. I had come to trust him, and he even seemed to like Gob, in a how-demons-do-it sort of way. Since Gob was always as hungry as a feral cat, he gave the boy little handouts of food and was amused by the kid’s elaborate caution whenever we left the confines of the tiny cabin. “Don’t you know you’re on my ship, little bug?” Riprash would bellow. “Nobody even pisses on The Nagging Bitch without my say-so!”
I never did find out if Riprash’s ship was named after anyone in particular, but Riprash had women (using the term loosely) in every port the slaver traded. Not that I ever encouraged him to share those stories. If you ever want to lose your interest in sex, try spending your vacation in Acheron Landing or even Penitentia, the spit of mud, rock, and ramshackle huts where we stopped for supplies on the second day. The dockside hookers looked like extras from Attack of the Mole Men, but Riprash assured me that only the best looking ones got to work the incoming vessels.
I won’t bore you with a description of the entire trip. From the middle of a river, one Hell city looks pretty much like another—namely horrible. The third day we finally sighted Gravejaw, a sullen knob of black lava rock that stuck out into the black swell of Cocytus like a bunion. A natural bay at its base had made it a port, and the desperate nature of life in Hell had soon turned it into a crawling ant heap of souls and demons. At the top of the great mound of stone, surrounded by walls as high as those of the city itself, stood a castle, a forest of black towers slender and sharp as an eel’s teeth. A huge banner flapped on the uppermost spire, a white bird’s claw painted on sable ground. It wasn’t the tallest thing on Gravejaw, though: at the center of the city a massive column loomed over everything else like a giant central pillar holding up the sky.