“You have no jurisdiction over me. Your business is tormenting the damned.” Niko moves his right hand as if writing in the air. “I abjure thee by all the ancient names—”
Rat Face hollers Shit and backs off and spreads his wings to their full and sail-like width. “This monkey son knows the old keys.”
“I’m wingin out,” says Notre Dame. He turns and leaps into the air.
Rat Face turns to regard Niko once more with a look of seething hatred.
“Take me down,” says Niko. “This has been willed where what is willed must—”
Rat Face stabs clawed fingers inches into his own tapered ears and shouts La la la la. And so singing jumps and flaps away.
Niko stops the incantation and watches them dwindle as they fly toward where the intermittent orange light originates.
NIKO WALKS AROUND the dropped stone fragment. From one edge a huge fan of blood has sprayed the ground. Niko glimpses motion at the base of the stone in the bloody patch’s midst and hurries to it. Unbelievably Sam’s hand sticks out beneath the stone. It is grossly swollen and once more blood has spurted from the fingernails. The fingers twitch as Niko approaches, wriggle frantically as he bends toward them.
Niko clasps Sam’s hand. The blood-drenched fingers clench. “Sam.”
The grip tightens.
“Can you hear me Sam?”
Relaxes and tightens again.
“One for yes, two for no, okay?”
One squeeze.
“I’m sorry, Sam.”
One.
“I can’t get you out this time. I’ve got to go.”
Two.
Niko glances about at the air, at the quiescent plain. Spies an object. “Hold on a second, Sam. I’ll be right back.”
Two.
“I’m coming right back, I promise. I’m just going to get something.” A hard squeeze and a release.
Five feet away is the trident Niko used to dig Sam from his former prison, a freedom Sam enjoyed for what, an hour? Niko drags the trident back.
Sam’s fingers drum with exaggerated impatience as Niko bends down again and says Aw Sam. He touches the hand and the bloody fingers slide around his.
“This is the best I can do. Here” He sets Sam’s fingers on the head of the trident and traces their contours so that Sam knows what he’s holding. “It’s not much but it ought to speed things up. Better than fingernails anyway.”
One squeeze.
“All right Sam. I have to go.”
Two.
“Come on Sam. Don’t make this harder on me.”
The hand bears down.
“Sam. You have to let me go.”
The hand holds tight and then lets go.
Niko straightens. “Good luck, Sam.”
The hand gives a thumbsup and Niko barks a sort of crying laugh. He says Okay and turns away. Even as he picks up his case the hand behind him grasps the trident and begins to dig.
X.
LAST FAIR DEAL GONE DOWN
NIKO STUBS A toe and jerks awake. He slept? Walking? How far has he come, how long did he sleep?
He looks around and wonders if he isn’t still asleep and wandering the province of a nightmare. The plain has grown more crowded and the crowd is more tormented. The air around him throbs with cries and sobs of voices flattened by the diseased wind.
The catalog of woe he’s seen thus far has now become a circus of debasement. To Niko’s right a raised wood platform twelve feet high and several miles long swarms with legions of the naked dead. Mostly men but a scattering of women. Surrounding the platform a picket of wooden spikes impales the damned. Speared like cocktail sausages atop each other and writhing like babies. Convulsive shudders, feeble grasping, useless mewling. Hopeless eyes track Niko as he walks their skewered picket.
Alternating with the spikes are taller, rough-hewn logs driven firm into the plain and slathered with black grease.
A demon with black horns, one jaggedly broken, towers above the platform’s milling dead. Grinning and hermaphroditic, pendulous baglike breasts and clublike penis. “Who’s next then?” Its voice oddly effeminate. It grabs a pale fat man with doughy skin and a bald spot large enough to make him look tonsured like a monk and hoists him by the throat. “Have a seat, my sweet meat pie.” The demon slobberingly kisses Tonsured Monk then hoists him over the platform’s edge. The man holds to the demon’s arm, his hands barely encircling the thick black wrist. His face gleams with the demon’s spittle. His struggles listless as he’s set onto a greased pole above a spike. Perhaps because the dead are fatalistic. Perhaps because the dead are dead. When he’s pushed against the slippery pole he lets go the demon’s wrist and wraps his arms and legs around it. He begins a slow slide down toward the ragged spikepoint just below his buttocks. He clutches and digs and undulates and scrapes splinters into his forearms and thighs but lowers nonetheless until the spike tip spears his naked anus.
On the ground a demon with a feathered head and blackbird wings inspects the picket of alternating poles and pikes. Casually it bangs a massive club against the shaft of one pike topped by a frail old man impaled and hanging motionless. The pikeshaft quivers and the old man gives a soft grunt that is worse than any scream.
The birdhead demon doesn’t even glance at him but continues down the spitted line, whacking skewers like a child with a branch against a picket fence. He trails a wake of cries and moans. “Well well well,” he calls. Whack whack whack. “And how are we fine pederasts today?” Whack whack whack. “Like being up on a pedestal do we?” Whack. “Want the kiddies to look up to us, yes?” Whack whack whack whack. “What’s the matter, meat pie? Got a stick up your ass?”
One man has managed to pull himself partway off his spike. The wood beneath him slathered with gleaming gore. Below that struggle half a dozen spitted damned. The broadshouldered man is powerfully built, Nordic with pale skin and long cornyellow hair. Thick legs braced against the thick greased pole in front of him and arms encircling. Incrementally he jacks himself up like a logger up a tree. One inch at a time and every fraction of it agony. Yellow Hair pulls himself off the spike—to escape to where, Niko can’t imagine—but just as his face flushes with a ghost of triumph the gigantic keening hermaphroditic demon jumps up from the platform and lands both birdlike feet atop his shoulders and drives him down until his naked ass impacts the dead impaled below him. A yard of gory spike protrudes now from his larynx. The demon grins and bends and kisses Yellow Hair’s forehead and then sucks the tip of the spike and jumps back to the platform with a farewell push. Yellow Hair screams an obstructed gargling shredding scream. He screams until cords stand cobralike from his neck, until the corners of his mouth tear back toward his jaw and his head flops backward on the ripped hinge until the back of it touches the nape of his neck and still his scream trumps wetly from his fleshy windpipe, ululated by the flopping meat of tongue. And still he screams.
Niko turns from the platform.
A line of several dozen children is being led by a demon Niko’s height but proportioned like a dwarf. This demon has a long raven beak and bloodred eyes set in a narrow wedge of head. Raven pulls the naked crying children merrily along, then stops abruptly. The children bump and scream.
“Shuddup ya babies,” Raven yells. “Whassamadda widjoo? You wanna find you twin, doncha? The one you murdered inside mommy?”
The children blubber louder and the demon puts his hands on his bladed hips and looks disgusted. “Crybabies make me sick.” To prove it he opens his beak and spews a chunky yellow bile that hisses where it strikes the children. The children in front jump back and all begin to scream fullout. But they remain standing in a perfectly straight line.