Despite the steady warm updraft Niko’s hands are clammy where they monkeygrip the monster’s neck. He no longer feels as if he’s going to faint but rather too alert. The bulk of his inhuman ferry hides the greater portion of the view but this may be a mercy. Below is only swarming dead and falling blood and vast unmeasured deep.
Geryon’s head turns backward like an owl’s. “Ready?”
Niko jerks back as the swiveling horns nearly knock him off. “Don’t do that.”
Pale lids shutter aqua globes: Geryon blinks. “No reason to get excited.” The great head rotates forward again and huge filigreed wings unfurl on either side of Niko. Their muscles flex beneath his ribs as they beat once to shudder the surrounding air. The dead world swims. Niko has an awful moment to realize that Geryon has duped him, that the creature is indeed the Monster of Fraud, that the beast is made of stone and therefore cannot fly. There must be some kind of way out of here apart from this.
The monster gathers itself and leaps into the dusky air.
AND FLIES.
A hole opens in the pit of Niko’s stomach as the monster plummets. Outside in the cold distance the wind begins to howl past great and cupping wings. Now Niko lies prone upon the broad back and holds onto Geryon’s shoulders and feels massive muscles flex beneath his chest in time to the beat of the wings.
They bank left and spiral down the darkening air. Beneath them the vast undifferentiated wall of cliff rises out of blackness to circle them and circle them. Slanting along its length like a scar runs the carved ramp down which listless souls trudge until they’re swallowed by encroaching darkness well before the bottom can be seen. From the arch hewn into the Battlements above the ramp and to the right, red rain and bodies gout. Geryon’s auger will not intersect the attenuating spray, which is just fine with his astonished passenger.
He sees a gleam from far below. A sea perhaps comprised of all the blood that rains onto the Lower Plain.
Niko is quite awake now, exhaustion and hunger and thirst forgotten in the moment. The beast to which he clings is unimaginable. The height from which he gapes is inconceivable. The number of the damned upon the ramp is incalculable. Wide as the ramp is, it is a mere thread against the vast face of the Ledge. There is such a nation of lost on their long march that bodies continually spill over the blunt edge along the ramp’s length culled from the lethargic herd that pushes and stumbles ever downward falling like the myth of suicidal lemmings, falling for entire minutes, naked spinning starfish shapes that sometimes strike the obsidian cliff wall and spin out and strike again, a drawnout tumble down to who knows where.
Geryon’s head swivels round again to check up on his passenger. He sees Niko staring at the everfalling bodies and tells him that they land atop a pile of their predecessors, and that those at bottom are crushed to shapeless pulp and never will escape. The mounded dead run the length of the ramp itself, piled higher directly beneath the apex of the ramp and gradually lowering until they meet the foot of the ramp where it empties on the Lower Plain.
Niko peers beyond the sculpted shoulder. Somewhere down there lies the shattered body of a brave and cruel Australian. Somewhere in that unknown space new torments lie. Afflicted in that empty sea of punishment are doubtless those whom he himself has met, known, liked, helped, wronged, loved, despised. Glowing dimly out in that anonymous expanse, a feather floating in a mason jar. Getting closer with each sinking leftward gyre through the starless air. Above them the Battlements hold sway, retching blood upon the parched and punished world below, falling on the unfathomed Lower Plain, quietly dyeing the mountainous piles of the mutilated dead, thickly flowing to feed the coagulated sea across the barren ground, raining hot and red in a fine red mist, descending general on the dead and their tormentors.
As the ramp rises ever rightward Niko hears a long lamenting growing from the multitude of unclad dead until his ears are filled with roaring on the naked dark.
His gaze snags on commotion within the chaos close at hand and he grips harder on the massive tendons underneath him. He shouts to no avail in the despairing din. He pounds the massive shoulder with his fist and once again the frightening beautiful head snaps round to face him with its soul-ensnaring eyes. Niko shouts again and points toward the seething ramp, toward the greater commotion within the squabbling damned, toward a figure naked save for hiking boots who is staving off the covetous crowd with swings and jabs of a black guitar case.
XIII.
LITTLE WING
“ARE WE THERE YET?”
“A great amount of heated air is rising from the lower plain. I am lifted by this updraft, and to descend I must spiral down in a kind of controlled stall. I can tuck my wings and drop if you prefer. It is a long way.”
“No no no, thanks. I was mostly kidding anyhow.”
“I should tell you I have no understanding of humor.”
“I figured it out. You should have been a critic.”
“I have met many here. May I ask you to move your instrument case a bit to the—oh that is much better.”
“Thanks for getting my guitar back.”
“I am for now your servant. Have you pried the hand loose yet?”
“I threw it off.”
“It might poke someone’s eye out when it lands.”
“And you say you have no sense of humor.”
“How do you find our Park?”
“You go into the Red Line and turn left.”
“I do not understand.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“You hold all Hell in great disdain I think.”
“How could I not?”
“This is my home.”
“Then you’re blind to what this place is. Or you just don’t know any better.”
“I am exactly as I should be for what and where I am. And I point out to you that screaming bodies fall around us as you speak yet you no longer even glance at them.”
“If I let it get to me I’d go insane.”
“Only the naive can afford such contempt.”
“Is there some point to this discussion?”
“I will be silent if you prefer.”
“ALL RIGHT, I can’t take it anymore. Let’s talk geography.”
“If you wish.”
“I wish. I don’t have a very clear sense of this joint’s structure.”
“It is an infinite plain.”
“But it’s in an enclosed space.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t get it. How could it be inside something and still be infinite?”
“I am not certain it can be gotten. Mortals do not comprehend the relationship between perception and expectation.”
“I see what I expect to see?”
“In a sense. In five senses.”
“Are you telling me that none of this is real? That I’m imagining it?”
“I am telling you that none of this is real but you are certainly not imagining it. And just as truly you are imagining it yet it is real.”
“Look, I sure as hell couldn’t have made this up. I mean look at the Ledge there. It extends as far as I can see in either direction.”
“It always will.”
“So the Ledge is infinite.”
“More or less.”
“An infinite ledge on an infinite plain.”
“The Ledge was not always there. The entire Park was once a single flat and borderless surface. The Ledge is a tectonic upthrust fault.”