Abaddon - Chapter 15

Day One

So you're going anyway? Despite all you know about the mortality rate down there?

Percival adjusted the straps of the rucksack on his shoulders. He'd picked up a sunburn in Basra only the week before, and it was rubbing. In Basra, of course, he'd been a 'Morale Officer'. He had not been permitted to be a chaplain.

Good show, that man. I wish I had balls that big, I really do.

A piece of the Stylite's handiwork gleamed like a galaxy on a wicked tangle of overhangs above him. There must be a depth, he imagined, beyond which luminous paint would cease to work, as all it did was store and redistribute daylight.

We're sending you down on your own, only the one man this time. We believe we have a transceiver now that can lock on to you down to three kilometres depth, we've been working on it for some time. And further down than that you have those dinky little diskettes, just dictate into the machine, pop out the diskette and, well, you know what to do with them -

On the other hand, maybe the Stylite's paint was the old, evil radium-type paint that caused cancer of the mouth. It had probably been bought in the Former Soviet Union, after all, where spivs sidled up to anyone vaguely wild-eyed and Middle Eastern at street corners and offered to sell them Red Mercury. The road surface, rough-cut blocks pointing out of the road in all directions, crunched under his feet, more like a natural growth of crystals than a highway suffering from two thousand years of neglect.

We'll be tracking you as far down as we can do, don't have any fears on that score. What's important to remember is that you're the first person who's actually been invited down...and that may make a difference. Sorry, must make a difference.

He stopped, realizing he was standing at the one-kilometre post, which glowed with an evil radium light that would last a thousand years. None of the Enemy in the pit beneath had yet seen fit to disturb it. On all four faces of the post it said clearly, in English, Russian and Vaemna, that the post marked the one-kilometre line and that progress beyond it was both highly dangerous and illegal. On the rock behind it, someone had already sprayed HOOZE AFRAID OF THE BIG BAD WULF in what looked like English, Russian and Vaemna.

Percival stopped just short of the pillar.

"I, Gavin Percival", he muttered, "am afraid of the Big Bad Wulf."

Then, slowly and deliberately, he took a step on down the Roman road.

"Good luck", hissed a voice from the rocks above him. "I don't know how this ends, for you."

Percival looked up. "Thanks." But he didn't take another step yet.

"Bogdanovich?"

"Yup?"

"How come the other people in Penny Simpson's notes became violent, aggressive, and murderous, and you didn't?"

The dark above his head appeared to consider. "I dunno. Perhaps because it took longer to affect me. Maybe my mind had time to adjust. But consider this - I may be putting you through the same process as if I'd banged your brains out with a boulder on first seeing you. It's just a question of timescale - because in my opinion, I am certainly sending you to your death."

Percival did not find this altogether reassuring. "Thanks."

"Don't mention it. And please remember, Percival...may I call you Percy?"

"You may not."

"The Black Queen is murderous, Percy. She is aggressive, she is violent. Do not ever foolishly consider her to be anything other than what she is."

The dark fell silent. The radio communicator buzzed in Percival's top pocket. He tore it out, without seeming to think about it, and threw it sideways into the pit. The gravel growled softly beneath his boots, and hordes of bats watched from beneath the overhangs like rows of upside-down operagoers. A long, long way above, a tiny pie of sky glowed an impossible, brilliant blue. Occasionally, a spraypainted graffito in English and what Percival imagined might be broken Russian lit the blackness - "TWO DEATHS HERE!", "CAREFUL, CRUMBLING ROCK!", or sometimes just a very large "!".

After a little while, he came to an area where even the Stylite's messages fell silent. There was not supposed to be any torchlight down here - her people don't need artificial light, the Stylite had said - but there were two yellow flames guttering ahead and below in the blackness. A welcome, maybe - or a lure? Continuing to pick out his own way with a hand torch, Percival pushed ahead, negotiating drops and rises in the route with care, but not taking excessive notice of the blackness to either side of him. "The Enemy", the Stylite had said, "will be out there in the dark at all times, waiting for any command, any excuse to close in and feast upon your pasty white flesh. There is absolutely nothing you can do about this. Live with it."

He came up, abruptly, to the two yellow flames, which were flickering on top of two crude candles. The candles, in turn, were fastened to the heads of stakes made of some material he thought it better not to scrutinize further. The candles stank like the inside of an oven after a Sunday roast, and were burning a smoky, livid yellow. Between them, on the grime and gravel, a carpet had been laid out - a beautiful, purple carpet of a quality surely intended to be hung rather than stood on. The carpet stretched out further than his light.

"It's a welcome", said the dark above him.

"Are you still there?" said Percival, amazed that the hermit seemed to have been able to climb silently in the pitch dark as rapidly as he could walk.

"Evidently", hissed the dark.

"I'd expect red", said Percival, "for a welcome."

"Well, this is purple", said the Stylite. "For a royal welcome." The carpet was, on a second examination, not exactly purple, but a deep mottled maroon that brought to mind dried blood. Tyrian purple, maybe, that hugely expensive dye of the ancient world, each litre of which was squeezed from the sepia of a million molluscs.

Or actual dried blood, obviously.

"In Euripides' Agamemnon", said Percival, "it's treading on a purple carpet which is Agamemnon's downfall. The ancient Greek gods punish him for his wicked pride. The people down here might be descended from Greeks. Maybe it's a test."

"It's a Persian carpet", said the hermit. "Not a Greek one. The language you can see along its borders is Persian. That name by your left foot, I am reliably informed, is 'Rustem', a great Persian hero. He's the guy below you to the right, fighting the big ugly white dude. I've seen the carpet before, being beaten out in their city square. Old war loot from many years ago, no more. Persian armies passed this way before, before the Greeks and Romans. And other armies passed before the Persians did -"

"You've been down as far as the City?"

"Once or twice. It's not an experience I care to repeat. I was lucky to pass through their scouts without being taken. I discussed the carpet at great length in correspondence with Her Infernal Majesty. It relates the exploits of the line of Zal. I'm not sure whether Zal really existed, or whether the Persians simply invented him. Certainly he was helped to power by a big white bird, which sounds highly dodgy from a standpoint of historical accuracy."

"Surely it would have faded by now, if it was that old."

"To get faded, it would have to see sunlight. And it's not seen the sun for a very, very long time."

"But the pictures -" Percival swept the feeble torch beam over bearded giants, flame-feathered birds, turbanned swordsmen - "this can’t be a carpet from a Moslem country, it's full of...idols."

"This is a carpet", said the cliff, "from what was shortly to become a Moslem country. And now I really must go, as the troglos are on their way. You're on your own now."

They're on their way.

Not wanting to tread on a two thousand year old heirloom, but not wanting to appear impolite, Percival gingerly edged out onto the weave and walked as softly as any kung fu master on any rice paper to its end. The gravel hardly whispered. He resumed his downward journey.

***

The Stylite had been right. Everyone did cough down here. Percival felt his eyes streaming and his mucous membranes wanting to turn themselves inside out.

At times, Simpson's journal had warned, there would be gaps in the rock, and he had been supplied with enough aid climbing gear to rappel down the walls of Hell to deal with this. The first of these he came to, however, had been helpfully bridged by driving three posts, made of what looked like steel leaf suspension springs, into the road surface on either side. Around these had been looped lengths of what (for want of more accurate descriptions that didn't disturb him deeply) he chose to call rope. This stretched three meagre strands of stuff across the void; one to tread on, two to hold on to on either side.

Not entirely trusting the bridge, he debated using the Bosch drill at his belt to punch a bolt into the wall and clamber across the gap, bypassing the bridge entirely. He decided against it. After all, if the means to cross had been provided, common courtesy dictated he should use them.

He wobbled out onto the first bridge, clinging on to the side ropes for dear life - and toppled over sideways immediately like a felled tree.

The strain of staying on the line nearly ripped his right arm from its socket. Items of minor importance - a St. Christopher's medal his mother had given him, a penknife, a pencil - slid from his pack's side pockets and fell into the dark, and he heard them rustling off cliffs beneath...far, far beneath. His right arm was tiring on the side rope. It was only a matter of time before he joined his possessions, and no matter how hard he hauled on the lines, they refused to let him back up to an upright position. The pack, unbelievably heavy, was bending his spine sideways like a bow.

Could the bridge be a booby trap? Would the troglodytes send a message halfway across the world to a man just to assassinate him for their own amusement?

No. There had to be a proper way to do this. He was just doing it wrong.

Gripping the standing rope using his feet as both sides of a pincer, he shifted his weight back onto it, bending his knees deeply, arriving back where he'd come from in a squat, the ropes coming back to the centre obediently.

So the side wires were just for guidance. The centre rope was where the weight went and had to stay. Carefully, treading on ricepaper for the second time that day, he eased himself inch by inch across the bridge, and arrived, soaking wet with with sweat and gasping, at the other side. Luckily, he'd been able to keep hold of the torch, which he had stupidly held in his hand when he’d started out across the chasm. He secured it to his pack with a length of bungee cord and infinite care, and continued.

There were three more bridges like this. By the time he'd negotiated them all, the common courtesy of his hosts in leaving him ways to cross the gaps in the road had left him with his heart pounding in his chest and his inner clothes soaked in perspiration; and then he came to the Black Smoker, in the place where Simpson's journal had said it would be, boiling evil from the rock. As he approached it, it seemed to boil towards him; he took several hasty steps backwards. The bulk of it was tumbling over the cliff, as if it was heavier than air; the Stylite had told him not to trust this. Sometimes it falls, sometimes it rises.

Watching the way the Smoke was blowing with obsessive-compulsive caution, he selected a part of the cliff that seemed easily climbable and set to it. Before long, he was fifteen feet up above the road surface, still warily watching the direction of the Smoke. As luck would have it, there was a crack vertically above the Smoke vent (but not a crack, as far as he could see, that was itself venting Smoke).

As cautiously as if milking venom from a serpent, he reached across to feel the crack for size, select a nut of the right shape, slide the nut into the crack, clip a karabiner onto the nut, slide a rope through the karabiner....

He looked down, and was both appalled and astonished. The Smoke cloud had bubbled out onto the road surface where he had begun his climb only seconds earlier, almost as if it were casting about for his scent, covering the flagstones like a murky black carpet.

Grimly, he smiled to himself, tested the anchor he'd placed with first one hand and then two, then swung out clean over the top of the vent, letting go of the rope and hurtling down the fifteen feet on the other side, rolling as he hit the gravel, congratulating himself on his cleverness half a second before braining himself on an armoured personnel carrier he hadn’t expected to be there and knocking his own lights out.

***

When he woke up, he had no idea how long he'd been unconscious. The Black Smoke was still bubbling out of the cliff, and seemed to have made no attempt to approach closer. But of course, if it had already approached him while he was under...but he reassured himself that he felt no different.

He upbraided himself for not having remembered the APC would be there from Penny Simpson's journal. True to the journal, the broad, open ledge up from which he was now heaving himself was indeed considerably wider than the normal road surface. It was also set about with more than just the one APC, and with spaces where other APC's had been before being rolled or driven away into the dark. The APC's all seemed to be variants of M113's, American-made, designed for maximum survivability on a nuclear battlefield. They were burnt out. Of their crews there was no sign.

The torch, contrary to any reasonable expectation, was still working. He felt a momentary surge of pride that it had been made in Britain, and resolved to get one of his own as soon as he returned back to the surface.

Unfortunately, the downside of the torch working was that it allowed him to see things.

All around him in a wide, ragged circle, the eyes of the inhabitants of the underworld shone like a million moons - apart, of course, from the fact that moons did not normally come in pairs. A million Martian moons, maybe. They were on the surface of the ledge around him, peering over the edge of the cliff beneath it, crawling in phalanx down the cliff above it. As they scuttled closer, the forms behind the eyes became dimly visible - alarmingly smaller than expected, the heads almost entirely occupied by eye. The eyes came no closer than the edge of the dim circle of torchlight, and now that they were closer, rather than being wide full moons, they were closed crescent slits.

Suddenly realizing that the torch was causing them pain, he lowered it, and immediately regretted his kindness. They came on in a surge of crackling gravel, moving several loping steps closer.

They're not monstrosities, said his good side. They're people just like you are, equally beloved of God.

But his pragmatic side added, No, they really are monstrosities. And just because God loves them doesn't mean you have to agree with him.

They closed in around him, but did not attack. The impression was not one of a raiding party, but an escort - although he could see that, at the back of the crowd, many of them were carrying what were surely weapons. They had been suspecting he might bring weapons of his own, and indeed, Waldrop had insisted that he bring the HP-35, though he'd slung it surreptitiously over the cliff fifteen minutes ago. How could thirteen bullets defend him against an onrush of a hundred of the creatures, when Armalites and hand grenades hadn't protected forty men five years before?

He walked with them down the path, keeping the beam of his torch low to the ground. The monstrosities followed, their faces illuminated from underneath by his torchlight, like children's faces telling Hallowe'en stories.

***

The city was immense, all the more so because it was so unexpected. He had, of course, known it existed - Simpson's notes had described it, and the Dornier drone had photographed it in detail six months ago, and Pentagon tacticians had gone over its weak points exhaustively - but nothing could prepare a man for finding a city where no city should be.

It had been constructed by a people who knew space was at a premium. Like the inhabitants of cities in similar environments - Venice, Manhattan, Tokyo - they had built upwards. The only freely available building material here, abyssite, had been piled up in abundance - the walls were high, buttressed, crenellated, machicolated, proof against siege, earthquake and, for all he knew, Godzilla. Towers jutted from them, with fantastical siege engines mounted on each on turntables that swivelled to cover Percival and his party as they approached the walls. Within the walls, the houses were towers higher than the walls themselves, connected by bridges on squat, businesslike romanesque arches. The bridges and buildings were almost as heavily fortified as the outer walls, though there were no windows - it only seemed possible to enter each roughly rectangular tower via a staircase winding round it to a single child-sized doorway. The child would have to bend down as it entered.

And the Infernal City stank like hell, a fact politely omitted in Penelope Simpson's tour guide. Above all, it stank of human excrement. Although the more obvious uses of human bodily waste, such as fertilizing fields, were irrelevant down here, Percival had no doubt that the fastidious people mentioned in Simpson's memoirs were finding other uses for it all around him. It certainly smelled as if they didn't just throw it away, and the place was a mass of flies, a solid carpet of them swarming around the bases of many of the buildings as he and his escort crossed the clanging steel drawbridge into the city. As he walked further, his guides' physical forms becoming horribly clearer as they passed under the streets' dim candles, he saw some of the inhabitants darting forth with nets of some diaphanous substance and skimming them into apertures at the buildings' bases, withdrawing them full of squirming masses of shit-smeared maggots. Nothing wasted, he told himself. The human animal operating at maximum efficiency. Human beings couldn't turn human shit into protein, but maggots did it with ease. He had little doubt that those maggots would end up on someone's dinner table - hopefully dead, roasted and shit-free.

He realized suddenly that he could see the activity going on in the streets around him. How could this be? The city's lucifuge inhabitants surely didn't need to hang tallow candles like lanterns on every street corner to be able to see. Had this (albeit dim) light show been put on solely for his benefit? And if so, why was every street illuminated?

Certainly, his escort were not allowing him to walk down any street he chose. Rather, he was being guided down a wide avenue, big enough for several people to walk abreast. The avenue was lined with armoured fighting vehicles from the past three millennia - US Army, Red Army, Waffen SS, Achaemenid - and led up to the precipitous steps of what could only be Penelope Simpson's Bathopolis. And in the tiny, V-arched crack at the head of the steps, the only light from the inside of the building was blocked by a golden throne, and a figure was occupying that throne.

The steps were covered by a purple carpet, larger than the first and considerably more splendid. Percival made a point of treading on it on his way up to the Royal Presence, grinding the faces of ancient Persian kings into the abyssite.

She had grown fat; this probably spoke of success, down here. As a young woman, she had been pretty. As an older woman, she had not aged like a fine wine. Rather, she appeared to have grown like a cancer. Her belly was a swollen, pregnant mass, on top of which huge breasts were piled like pillows. Her face was now framed in fat, her arms and legs massive, her hair grown long enough to provide a bed for her where she sat. Her coiffure also looked to be crawling with much the same minute parasites as the Stylite's beard, though all about her Troglodytes fussed and fretted, combing the night crawlers from her fringe, scrubbing blood and afterbirth from the insides of her thighs, tracing out new lines of kohl and henna all over her as if she were a work of performance art in progress. There was no expression visible in the mass of baroque curlicues her maids-in-waiting had made of her face, which was lit from behind in any case. Percival felt that, under the circumstances, shining torchlight in her eyes might be interpreted as an attack. And she still had not yet moved at all. She might be a dead, rotting corpse still being blindly worshipped by the troglodytes for all he knew.

"Your Majesty", he said, thinking this the correct manner of address, and bowed.

A voice issued from the dark where the Queen's voice ought to be. "Regina inferorum placet servum salutare".

"It pleases the Queen of the Underworld to greet her servant", echoed a heavily-accented voice from the left hand side of the throne.

"Latinam loquor", said Percival huffily. "I took Classics at university. But being English, the Queen also understands English. What is the reason for me being here?"

There was a pause while the voice from the left interpreted - entirely unnecessarily, Percival was certain. Then the throne spoke again, creakily, croakily, like a gearbox being pushed into a gear that had not been used for a very long time. It sounded, however, amused.

"I remember English", it said in English. "A language busy with small words, overburdened with ways for describing genitalia, incapable of inflection and bereft of a proper subjunctive. A simplified dialect of German."

"And a language now spoken by twenty per cent of the world's population", said Percival. "Whereas Latin is now spoken by Latin teachers, academics, some but not all priests of the Roman Catholic Church, and of course Her Majesty. What is my reason for being here? I do not wish to be rude, but my question has not been answered." Percival felt that this question was better asked in English. If he had asked it in Latin, he was certain, the Queen's loyal subjects would have killed him.

The throne cackled, though it might have been a cough. "You're here because you're here because you're here because you're here, Mr. Percival. You are here because I remember you being here."

Ye gods, not this again. "What is it I do", said Percival, "when I'm here?"

"I can't see everything you do. I can only remember what I will actually see happen." The dark cackled again. "What'd'you think I am, psychic?"

Percival absorbed this. "Okay. Let's put the question another way. What do you want me to do while I'm here?"

"We do, it is true, have an immediate problem worthy of your attention. My people are suffering, Mr. Percival. Move your torch to right and left, and you will see evidence of that fact." The Queen barked commands in bat-Latin. "Move your torch; I have told them not to shy away from the light."

Cautiously, Percival swept the light beam right and left. The creatures caught in it whimpered, shrank from the light, and hid their eyes with massive fingers, but did not run. Some were male, some were, it seemed, female, though the females' breasts were tiny and emaciated. Both sexes' skulls were dominated by their massive eyes, the space between the temples grown wider to accommodate them, the head tilted slightly backwards on the cervical vertebrae to take the sheer weight of the eyes. The body was actually not slight and childlike as Percival's first impressions had suggested, but squat and massive. The forearms, in particular, were hard with muscle, and the fingertips of the hands square and flat, with fingernails thick as penknife blades. The toes were also long, thick and flat at the tips, and exhibited a marked separation between the big toe and the next.

But the most marked feature of the things' bodies was the fact that they were injured - in many cases, horribly, fatally so. These were not subtle wounds produced by Greek Fire or some black poison, but limbs hacked off, bones shattered and protruding from the arm, ragged wounds that had failed to heal and were going an ominous, dingy grey. Percival became suddenly aware that much of the smell he had imputed to the sewage systems at the bases of the city's towers might in fact have been the stink of gangrene emanating from his own escort. Somewhere out beyond the city's walls, recently - but not within the last twenty-four hours, by the advanced stench of those infections - a battle had taken place.

"The Enemy is one we know of old", said the Queen. "They are not as subtle as we are, but possess one great advantage - somehow, they are able to see in the great, deep, complete dark over four thousand metres down, where even ambient light never reaches even at midday. My people can see in near darkness, but not total. For this reason, we avoid the deep dark and tolerate the fact that some of our number are occasionally caught and eaten in the lower reaches of our range."

"Eaten", repeated Percival.

"Often with the bare minimum of culinary preparation", said the Queen with some distaste. "However, recently, the Enemy's depredations have been bolder. We suspect that either his numbers are growing due to, perhaps, a freak number of exceptionally fertile breeding years, or that some other power or predator beneath him is forcing him to move upwards out of his traditional territories. Perhaps there is a sort of malthusian effect in progress, we representing the food source, they representing the predator, and they are simply multiplying naturally to consume all available food supplies in their area after which they will starve and die down again. I have no idea. But the situation is growing desperate. We have recently found it necessary to post guards even in the environs of this City itself, and more recently still one of these guard duties was itself attacked, losing half its number and suffering casualties to many of the remainder."

"How can these creatures see in total darkness?" said Percival. "Do they use some sort of infra-red?"

"They would appear to use their eyes to see", said the Queen, still appearing to find her story mildly amusing, "as captured prisoners were unable to find their way around their cages once these organs were removed. If the ears were removed, however, no such loss of perception was experienced, though the prisoners ceased to respond to sound."

"So it's something in their eyes. Rattlesnakes", said Percival, "have an infra-red sense organ located in pits in the head. They use it to sense mice in the dark. But", he added hastily, "the pits aren't located in the eyes."

"I suspected the Enemy's senses might be based on infra-red", said the Queen, nodding, "and sent my own patrols out with candles, and even torches, in the hope that a bright heat source might blind them. As you can see, the streets of our City are currently lit up as if it is Christmas. However, it has been reported that this tactic has not been a major success. I must pronounced myself baffled. We still have one live prisoner, however, intact with all appendages, should you wish to inspect it. Loquax, my royal translator here" - a hand drifted idly from her side to indicate the English-speaking creature at the right hand of her throne - "will show you to it. We preserved it for that reason. I am certain it will...interest you. A man of your profession will, I am certain, have been expecting to see such a creature all his life. You of all people will understand fully why beings of its stamp need to be exterminated from the under earth. The prisoner has witnessed the experiments on its fellow prisoners and is most docile."

"So you expect me to prosecute a war for you?" said Percival. "Miss Simpson, I hate to point this out to you, but although I am an Army officer, I am also still a chaplain."

"That does not have to be a problem. I myself have a function which is at the same time both religious and military. But this is a minor errand, not the main reason why we have requested your presence here. You, Mr. Percival, are the man who will go down into the deep and explain to us all why we are here. You will explain the nature of the Abyss. You will find the Temple. You will look down into the dark and see what none of us can see."

Percival's hands hung loosely at his sides. He stared into space.

"That's a...tall order."

"You have already delivered on that tall order. I have already foreseen your triumphant return."

"How did I do it?"

The voice was mocking. "You didn't bother to communicate such trifling details to me."

Not knowing exactly how seriously to take the Queen's statement, Percival eased the rucksack off his shoulders onto the steps. As always on taking off a pack, he felt like a moonman, bouncing with every step. His shoulders creaked into a normal human position. He massaged them gently, wishing Waldrop hadn't insisted he bring quite so much spare ammunition, and wishing he'd had the sense to throw away the ammunition after he'd thrown away the HP-35.

"I suppose you'd better show me your prisoner, then", he muttered. "Will my gear be safe here?"

"This is Hades", came the answer, "not Haringey."

***

The prisoner was intact. That was all that could be said for its state of health, though it had obviously also been allowed water and oxygen. It had been wounded during capture, though the wounds appeared to be confined to heavy bruising. The cell in which it was confined was only barely larger than a wardrobe, and was indeed more or less the same shape as a wardrobe tipped onto its thin side, with a metal grille on top. It was set into a row of other, similar wardrobe-holes in the stone floor of a large wardrobe-hole-containment building. Percival remembered Coalition propaganda that had claimed Saddam Hussein operated a prison with a similar cell system in Iraq. Percival, who had been in Iraq, had not seen it.

The prisoner cringed at the bottom of its cell, with good reason - bone spears with points sharp enough to put an eye out were currently holding it at bay. Small localized bruises all over the prisoner's body suggested it had already suffered a vigorous poking, though it was difficult to gauge the full extent of its injuries.

In terms of physical dimensions and body plan, there was no marked anatomical difference between the prisoner and the troglodytes poking it back into the cell. And yet the creature's jailers seemed to fear it, as if it were not a flesh and blood being, but something supernatural - something that, unless they kept a careful eye on it, might turn into a puff of smoke and drift through the bars and away, to prey on their children another day.

"Diabolus est", spat a voice in their barely recognizable argot of Latin. It is a devil.

"Homo qui non adest est", whispered another voice in a sentence that sounded like an echo. What did that mean? 'It is a man who isn't there'?

But the creature appeared just as fearsome to Percival as to its tormentors, and the first reason why this was so was also the reason why it was so difficult to see where (or even whether) it was bleeding; its skin was a bright, vivid, bloody devil red. And the second reason why it was terrifying, even in captivity, was that its eyes, eyes of the same hypnotic size as those of the creatures that had incarcerated it, glowed like flickering coals. Satan himself might have had such coals for eyes, to burn the insides of his eyesockets. This was no reflection, as in the eyes of a dog or cat or shark - the light actually seemed to be generated within the very eyes themselves.

Percival requested that the cell be closed, and that moves be made to transfer the prisoner to a larger cage. The creature which had spoken as the translator for the throne appeared to understand, and to Percival's surprise obeyed the order without question.

Heavy hands pressed food on Percival, on makeshift plates which he dimly recognized as titanium votive tablets - waterproof, rustproof, light, heat-resistant, and probably highly valuable tableware down here. The food was probably an expensive meal, too; large, hard-to-come-by gobbets of good red meat, boiled until dull grey and rubbery. Percival, suspecting he knew exactly where the meat had come from, declined it. There were, after all, limits to courtesy. The creatures kept attempting to press it on him. He kept declining it. Eventually, exasperated, he took a great handful of the grey muck and threw it into the cell occupied by the prisoner, who fell on it greedily. The natives around him gaped in horror. Uncaring, he looked into the eyes of the the creature through the bars as it munched ravenously on what was probably the remains of its former comrades.

"You are going to die horribly", he said, "which is probably no more than you deserve. But until I know for sure you really are a devil in league with Satan, I will keep you alive as long as I can."

Wearily, he trudged back to the steps of the Bathopolis, extracted a packet of raisins from a side pocket of his pack, and began to feed.

***

In one of the windowless stone towers, Percival was given a place to sleep. The entrance to his living quarters was so tiny that he had to drop onto all fours and squirm rather than crawl; a native holding a steel sabre-blade sharpened to molecular thickness, more a butcher's cleaver than a sword, stood over the entrance on the inside. Percival was certain his head would have left his shoulders had he tried to wriggle into the building unannounced, or with his eyes glowing.

Inside, the building was a wide flat space with a ceiling too low to stand beneath, even for the natives. They slept on hair mattresses - Percival had no illusions as to where the hair came from, though at least hair could be removed without ill effects from a living body - and blankets probably woven from the same materials. Families were snoring in here, piled on top of one another in gigantic, sussurating heaps. And despite the fact that the citizens hated it and shied away from it and held their hands in front of their faces to shield their eyes from it, each room was filled with light. The brilliance was surely unnecessary for the dinnerplate-eyed natives; candles sent a dim flickering light into every corner, like the bedroom of a small child who fears that monsters lurk in the merest shadow.

"Lux haud bonus est", explained Loquax, sensing Percival's curiosity. The light is not good. "Sed requiritur, quod mirabiliter hostes nostros haud videre possumus." But it is needed, on account of our enemies' weird invisibility.

"Et vidit deus lucem", said Percival, "quod haud bona esset." Loquax laughed a mouthful of daggers. He was familiar with the Bible. Judging by the amount of Christian attention this place had received over the centuries, this was perhaps hardly surprising.

Stephanie, what am I come to? See what happens when you're not here to tell me going for a jaunt down the road to Hell might not be a good idea? Could you not have had the decency to keep breathing after all those A & E doctors and nurses put all that work and all those tubes into you, into keeping you alive? People who get as far as A & E are supposed to survive and undergo a tearful reunion with their loved ones. TV hospital dramas say it, it must be true.

This is a test. All life is a test, like a big school examination. There are right answers, and there are wrong answers. Is Hell real, and is this the way to it? Am I down here just because I want to test my theological strength by holding my hand in hellfire without getting burned? And did I, today, really come face to face with a devil?

The building's many storeys were all like this, with successive floors and ceilings made of vaulted stone - vaults of such artful flatness that they seemed made of reinforced concrete rather than masonry. On each level, staircases twined upward - the staircases on the inside were larger and easier to force himself through - until finally, he and his guides arrived on a flat platform on the very roof of the building, caressed by a gentle breeze from underground. Here, in defiance of all logic, and surely with some considerable engineering difficulty, a gigantic four poster bed had been erected, complete with feather mattress, lacy quilted pillows, a gauzy canopy allowing curtains to be drawn around the bed on all three open sides, and sheets that, although mouldy, had once been silk. To complete his feeling of disorientation, the carvings that crawled around the posts and headboard swarmed with eagles and swastikas. This was a Nazi bed, removed from the Totalitarian Complex sixty years ago. Thoughtfully, someone had constructed a protective Alpine-chalet roof over the top of the bed, sewing together titanium votive tablets over a roof of wood or bone to protect against the constant drip-drop of water and the less constant but more life-threatening BLAM of falling abyssite.

Suddenly realizing exactly how many of the structural members of the City were bone - all those that weren't stone or steel - Percival understood why the Citizens had shown no compunction in desecrating the graveyard of Nazi and Soviet soldiers high above. No citizen of the City would ever be buried in a grave. To them, the human body was a treasure-house of reusable materials. Children turned mother's milk into strong bones that could be used to support a roof, once the surrounding child was cut away. Percival reflected that he would not be surprised if the City farmed children for precisely that purpose. Young bones, after all, were less brittle, and more flexible.

He eyed the bed like a hermit in the desert trying not to look at a beautiful young woman he knew to be a succubus. Someone had even placed an oil portrait of Adolf Hitler next to the headboard, to make him feel more at home.

Loquax was squatting nervously by the exit to the stairs, shifting his weight from heel to heel, as if ready to flee if Percival signalled his displeasure.

Such trouble, thought Percival. They have gone to such trouble.

He smiled down at the Queen's translator. "Loquax", he announced, "amicus meus est, in saeculo saeculorum, amen."

The little troglodyte glowed with pleasure and embarrassment. Percival reached for his pack, which he had dragged with some difficulty up every step and through every doorway, and extracted a sleeping bag, which he unrolled and stared at. He stared at the bag, then at the bed. Then he sat down on the bed with a thump, undid his boots, telling himself he would take off his dry suit trousers, proper trousers, thermal undertrousers, and amusing comedy WEAPON OF MASS ERECTION Saddam Hussein jockey briefs later, and fell asleep as if a switch had been thrown in his brain.

***

Several nights later, they sent the Dornier down to look for him.

He awoke from a bad dream. Wandering the streets because his wife had been hit by a car, he had crawled off the street into a spin dryer in a launderette for warmth. But the walls of the dryer were red hot, and the air was choking his lungs, and the dryer was full only of field-grey Waffen SS socks with stitched-on portraits of Adolf Hitler. The spin dryer had DORNIER written on the inside of the drum. He remembered thinking this was stupid - what was the point of writing the name of the the manufacturer on the inside of the machine? Yet suddenly the air in the spin dryer was blowing freezing cold, and a voice was shouting that it was George Waldrop and was concerned for his welfare. And the name DORNIER kept whirling around, and around, and around -

He woke up, and the bedclothes were all but coming off. It was also, uncharacteristically for underground, blowing a gale. The curtains were straining at their moorings, and Adolf Hitler’s portrait was in danger of sailing away forever.

The source of the wind sat spinning in the air only yards away from him, supported by three silvery whirling rotors. Its single black TV camera eye was fixed firmly on Percival. Percival noted with disquiet that it now had what looked like a gunbarrel mounted underneath its chassis, which was orange and white and the shape and size of the drum of an industrial spin dryer, and labelled DORNIER in large black letters.

Previously, the Dornier had not been armed. Percival hoped against hope that the thing was only a shotgun microphone. It had speakers, too. The speakers said: “LIEUTENANT PERCIVAL! THIS IS GEORGE WALDROP. ARE YOU OKAY? DO YOU NEED ASSISTANCE?”

By this time, however, native militiamen had swarmed out of the stairwell leading to the roof, rushed to the edge of the building, and showered the device with bone spears. The spears splintered into vertebrae on the drone’s rotors, and it turned its gunbarrel round towards them threateningly as arrows pinged off its lower surfaces from below.

“WE ARE CONCERNED FOR YOUR WELFARE”, droned the drone. “PLEASE COMMUNICATE VIA WHATEVER MEANS. THIS IS GEORGE WALDROP. WE HAVE LOST RADIO CONTACT WITH YOU. PLEASE COMMUNICATE -“

Then the drone rose on a keening engine note, easily outclimbing the ragged parabolas of stone age weaponry sent up after it from the ground, and disappeared into the dark; and the night was quiet once more.

***

At the beginning of his next day in the City, Percival searched his belongings for the emergency communications capsules supplied him by Waldrop. These were admirably compact, looked as if they’d been homemade to order in a workshop, and to date had made excellent paperweights. Each came with its own RECORD button and a tiny internal audio CD drive. The CD’s, he had been told, wrote once only. He had even been shown one; they were the size of plumbing washers.

Eventually, he found a capsule and took it to the top storey of one of the City’s many towers. Placing it on the low point of a merlon, he shooed away all nearby natives, stepped back, cleared his throat, and pressed the RECORD button.

“This is Gavin Percival”, he said. “I apologize for not having been in touch sooner. I am well and have successfully made contact with the inhabitants of the City. Assistance of the Stylite has been invaluable and recommend continuing good relationship be cultivated in this area. Please send him some clean socks. Will communicate further when further developments develop.” He clicked the RECORD button off and pressed LAUNCH. As specified in its design, a tiny pressure bottle inside the capsule slowly hissed out helium into a small orange bag extruded by the capsule, which became a large orange bag, which became a balloon, which caused the capsule to bounce gently off the ledge into the air, and then to rise, first slowly, then at a rapidly increasing rate. He watched the balloon dwindle slowly in the tiny white dinnerplate of daylight high above him, spiralling upward, a tiny orange dot.

He made another recording for good measure. It would never do to have Waldrop and the sort of people Waldrop represented coming down here to rescue him when he had been received with the finest hospitality Hell had to offer.