Inferno (21 page)

The giant tried to shake himself. The chains barely rustled.

No danger here.

You writhe and you struggle, but there’s no way around it. Me too, giant
. From every possible direction it looked the same. It was going to be unreasonably easy for Allen Carpentier to enter the Circle of Traitors . . . the place of punishment for those who had betrayed their benefactors.

I thought it over for a long time. Then I turned and started back.

24

G

oing
back was harder. The dip at the lower end of the tenth bridge was steeper, and now I was climbing it. I crossed the pit without looking down and climbed backward down the high end of the bridge.

I saw the next bridge close by, and made for it.

A sword point flicked up before my eyes. I stopped. Surely he’d been under a different bridge? I’d skewed my path deliberately. But a half-human, half-bestial head beyond the sword’s point shook itself negatively.

“You can’t go back, Carpentier.”

“I have to.”

The blade hung before me, rock-steady. I could have chinned myself on it. I half-stepped forward and the blade moved too fast to follow. Now it pricked the tip of my nose.

I shrugged and turned back.

I took no chances. I crossed the inner pit again and circled through the wasteland beyond. Two bridges away, I crossed again—on my belly. I slid down the high end of the bridge and kept crawling along the ridge above the ninth pit. He couldn’t be under
all
the bridges.

Couldn’t he just. Like the damned clerk. He was waiting when I tried to stand up. At this, the low side of the pit, he had the angle on me. “You can’t go uphill,” he said. “I really don’t know how to make it plainer.”

“I’m from the Vestibule,” I said. “I don’t belong here.”

“You never created your own church, Carpentier?”

Oh dammit! “Listen, those weren’t in competition with God or anybody! All I did was make up some religions for aliens! If that was enough you’d have every science-fiction writer who ever lived!”

“We’ve got
him
,” said the demon, and he pointed with the sword.

I forgot the sword entirely. I leaned far out over the edge of the pit to see. “What in Hell—to coin a phrase—is that?”

It was, in a sense, the last word in centaurs. At one end was most of what I took for a trilobite. The head of the trilobite was a gristly primitive fish. Its head was the torso of a bony fish . . . and so on up the line, lungfish, proto-rat, bigger rat, a large smooth-skinned beast I didn’t recognize, a thing like a gorilla, a thing like a man, finally a true man. None of the beasts had full hindquarters except the trilobite; none had a head except the man. The whole thing crawled along on flopping fish-torsos and forelegs and hands, a tremendous unmatched centipede. The human face seemed quite mad.

“He founded a religion that masks as a form of lay psychiatry. Members try to recall previous lives in their presumed animal ancestry. They also recall their own past lives . . . and that adds an interesting blackmail angle, because those who hear confession are often more dedicated than honorable. Excuse me.”

For the line of victims had bunched up while we talked. The demon turned and sliced at them rapidly, to a tune of screams and curses. The centaur creature he sliced into its separate components, and it went past him in a parade, on arms and forelegs and wriggling fishy fins. The sword flicked up again just as I’d decided to make a break for it.

A bead of blood formed at the tip of my nose. “I’m not like him,” I said quickly. “He played the game for real. With me it was just a game.” I backed away until the tenth
bolgia
was an emptiness beneath my heels. He couldn’t reach me now. “Take the Silpies. They were humanoid but telepaths. They believed they had one collective soul, and they could prove it! And the Sloots were slugs with tool-using tentacles developed from their tongues. To them, God was a Sloot with no tongue. He didn’t need a tongue; He didn’t eat, and He could create at will, by the power of His mind.” I saw him nodding and was encouraged. “None of this was more than playing with ideas.”

The demon was still nodding. “Games played with the concept of religion. Enough such games and all religions might look equally silly.”

“You can’t do this!” I shouted. “Listen, there’s a friend of mine in the eighth
bolgia
, and it’s my fault he’s there, and I’ve got to get him out!”

“Did anyone promise you it would be easy? Or even possible?”

“Whatever it takes,” I said, and thought I meant it.

“Step closer.”

I walked to the edge.
Carpentier shows his good faith
.

The sword flashed twice. I heard and felt the tip grate along my ribs. It left two vertical slashes along my chest and belly. I reeled back with my arms wrapped around myself to hold my guts in.

The demon was watching me steadily. What could he be waiting for?

I knew. I stepped forward and dropped my arms.
Carpentier shows his inability to learn
.

The sword flashed twice more, leaving two deep horizontal slashes, perhaps mortally deep. A living man would have fainted from shock. I couldn’t.

“Games,” said the big evil humanoid. “Your move.”

I studied the slashes and the flowing blood. Shock did seem to be slowing down my thought processes, but presently I saw what he meant. I said, “What do I use for a pencil?”

“You’ll think of something.”

I studied my fingernails. I thought of something.

I gouged a ragged X in the top left square of the diagram. The sword flashed to place an O in an adjacent corner.

I

climbed the first slope of the bridge on fingers and toes. When I could walk I held my arms wrapped around myself, holding me in. The pride of my victory seemed excessive for a stupid game of tic-tac-toe.

As I left the bridge I heard him call, “Carpentier?”

I turned my head.

“Best two out of three?”

My imagination was dead of shock. The only dirty word I could think of was one I’d never use again, not after seeing the place of the flatterers. I just kept walking along the rim.

The eighth pit was a canyon filled with firelight. “Benito!” My voice echoed hollowly between the canyon walls. “Benito!”

Some of the flames wavered. Thrumming voices, retarded by the transfer from voice to flame tip, floated upward.

“Leave the damned to suffer alone.”

“Benito who?”

“Bug off, you!”

The canyon stretched endlessly away in both directions in a gentle curve. If it was a full circle, it could hold millions. How was I to find Benito?

“Benito!” There was panic in my voice. The strain hurt my slashed chest. “Benito!”

“Benito Mussolini? He just passed me going
that
way—”

“No, it was the other direction.”

“You’re both wrong. Mussolini’s in the boiling lake.”

A fat lot of help I’d get here. And if I found him, what then? How was I going to get him out.

How did he get out in the first place? Maybe he’d already left again. A frustrating thought, because I couldn’t do a thing about it, and it would mean I’d played my game with the demon for nothing. I hoped Benito was already out, but I had to assume he was still in there.

The canyon wasn’t all that deep. What I needed was a climber’s rope. Yeah, an asbestos one, stupid! Benito was on fire! For that matter, I hadn’t seen any ropes anywhere.

I thought for a second about the chain on the giant. It would mean passing the demon twice—

No. Even if I got the chain loose, it was too heavy to move, and the freed giant would probably crush me for my trouble. I was glad I didn’t have to decide to face the demon’s sword again. I don’t know what I would have done.

Well?
Think, Carpentier! There are tools in Hell. Sure, boats carry rope. Now we’re getting somewhere. A heavy rope, kept wet while Benito climbs—Wait a minute. How do we climb the cliff when there’s no rope yet? There haven’t been any boats since the gaudy alien Geryon took us down. Tackle Geryon again?

And if it doesn’t work, back in the bottle while Benito burns?

Benito was smarter than I was. Maybe he’d think of something. “Benito!”

Mocking, thrumming voices answered.

I thought of fourteen feet of sword blade attached to a twenty-foot demon. Disable the demon (with what?), cut the blade loose (how?), send it down to Benito. But could he climb something that sharp? Or would he lose his fingers immediately? Did fingernail burn?

Waitaminute! There were smaller demons, higher up, carrying pitchforks!

I made for the bridge. In a few steps I was running. If I slowed down I’d want to stop, because I was terrified of what I planned.

I was in too much of a hurry. I was trotting toward the base of the tremendous bridge over the chasm of thieves when something flashed scarlet from behind a rock. I turned, frowning . . .

. . . and there was agony, flashing out from my neck to engulf me and drown me. I felt my bones soften and bend.

The pain drew back like a broken wave receding but it left a blackened mind. I was confused; I couldn’t think. A homely bearded man bent over me, saying urgent words that made no sense.

“Which way out?” He was huge, I realized. A giant. I stepped toward him—and I was tiny and four-legged; my belly scraped the ground. A lizard. I was a lizard.

The bearded man repeated himself, enunciating each word. “Which way out? How can I leave Hell?”

Vengeance. I advanced on him. Bite the son of a bitch! He backed away, still talking, but I couldn’t understand him.

He stopped and seemed to brace himself.

I leapt. I sank my teeth into his belly. He howled, and I dropped to the ground, writhing in new agony.

When my mind cleared I was a man. I rolled away fast from the red lizard and didn’t stop until there was a rock between us. The lizard stayed where he was, watching me.

I was making for the next bridge when his words came back to me. My dumb reptile brain had registered them only as sounds.

“You can’t speak!” he’d wailed. Then, “Tell me! I’ll let you bite me, but tell me the way out!”

He was a scarlet splash on a gray rock. Still watching me.

I pointed downslope, toward the lake of ice. “There! All the way to the center, if I haven’t been lied to myself!”

I glanced back once more after I’d crossed the next bridge. The lizard was poised on the rim, staring down. As I watched, he made his decision. He leapt into the pit.

Now what was that all about?
Never mind, Carpentier, you’ve got other concerns
. . .

25

F

ar
below me, the golden monks stood like so many statues. Every couple of seconds one or another would rock forward as if its base were unstable. The broken bridge dropped in a cascade of rock.

I stopped to catch my breath (Habit, Carpentier! You could give that up), then went down the broken slope with some care. It would have been easy to break an ankle.

I had reached the floor of the canyon before I noticed that one of the monks had turned completely around to stare at me. His slate-gray eyes were the oldest, the weariest I had ever seen, and I recognized them.

He said, “Didn’t you pass here a week ago?”

“A few days, I think. And you’ve only come this far?”

“We hurry as fast as we can.” The gray eyes studied me. They were so tired; they made me want to sag down and rest. “May I ask, what game are you playing? Are you a courier or something equally unlikely?”

“No, I—” Why not tell the truth? He wasn’t about to run and tell someone. “I’ve got to steal a pitchfork from one of the ten-foot demons in the next pit over.”

“Don a cloak like mine,” he said. “See what it does to your sense of humor.”

I sank down against the bank. Those tired eyes . . . “I’ll wear the cloak,” I said. “You get Benito out of the Pit of the Evil Counselors. Okay?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I pushed a good friend into the Pit of Evil Counselors. If I can’t—”

“But why would you do a thing like that?”

I howled. It startled me more than him. I’d been about to say something else entirely. But no words came, and I threw back my head and howled. The tears streamed down my face.

The monk said something in a foreign language. He tottered toward me and stopped. He didn’t know what to do. “There, there,” he said. “It will be all right. Don’t cry.” With a touch of bitterness he added, “Everyone will notice.”

There was a howl as big as the world inside me. It wanted out, and it was stronger than I was. I howled.

The priest muttered to himself. Aloud he said, “Please. Please don’t do that. If you will only stop crying, I will help you get your pitchfork.”

I shook my head. I got out a whimpered, “How?”

He sighed. “I cannot even take off my robe. I do not see how I can help. Perhaps I could act as bait somehow?” He lifted his head, his teeth grinding with effort, to look up along the cascade of broken rock.

I stood up. I patted him on his leaden back:
Clunk, clunk, chink
. “You’ve got your own problems.” I girded up my mental loins and started up the slope.

Loose rocks rolled under my feet. This was the high side of the gully. It took a long time to get to the top. I had just one advantage: part of the bridge still projected out from the cliff. I climbed in its shadow and stopped underneath. I waited.

After all, what could a demon do to me? Rip me to pieces? I’d heal.

Drop me into the pitch forever?

Throw me into the Pit of Thieves?

One of the horned black demons strolled past, his head turned to study the pitch on the other side of the ridge. He held six yards of iron pitchfork balanced in one hand. All I had to do was leap out and grab it.

I let him go. When he was past I began to shake. The beast had three-inch claws, ten. And eight-inch tusks, two. And Carpentier was a coward.