Abaddon - Chapter 23

2: An Audience With The Management

The Earl of Hell's coach was black, as befitted his position. It was a four-horse brougham, furnished with the by-now-familiar coat of arms - a winged, crowned thing with the tail of a scorpion rampant - and lanterns held in crystal prisms at each corner. There were no fairy lights this time, the lanterns being, apparently, fuelled by a passable facsimile of oil. He could even smell it burning. The horses pulling the coach were horses. Percival had half expected wolves or prehistoric lizards. He was becoming too cold and tired to be frightened.

There was a road leading up out of the little bone-gravel courtyard outside the tavern - a road that, as soon as it left the grubby environs of the village, ceased to be constructed of splintered skull fragments and started being made of masonry. A huge sweeping shelf of precision-cut blocks carried the road upwards, marching up a cliff that should have been vertical and turning it into a gentle walk. Mining and moving the stone alone would have taken the entire population of Penelope Simpson's city a hundred years. And the colour of the stone, in the white fairy fire lanterns, was not the familiar oiled-engine black, but a rich, granular ochre.

Not Abyssite.

The road spiralled upwards in and out of sight, looping around colossal pillars of stone large enough to support cities, until it travelled up to the foothills of the colossal pile of masonry that made up the Bridge. He could even see a tiny toy carriage very like his own, travelling up through a miniscule guarded archway up into one of the colossal buttresses...

The diabolic footman mounted the front of the coach - with difficulty due to his tail, which was provided for in the cut of his breeches - and instructed the horses to walk on, doubtless in the ancient abhorred Aklo language of sleeping R'lyeh. The coach turned a perfect pirouette in the street outside the Eternal Wandering Inn of the Damned, and set off in an uphill direction. Percival settled into a surprisingly pleasant velvet seat embroidered with winged crowned horrors of the nether pit, and drifted off to sleep.

***

When he awoke, gargoyles were passing grinning over his head, just visible through the side window. The gargoyles were made of stone. Percival watched them warily in case they came to life without warning, but they continued to stare sightless out of the keystones of the arches they were set into.

The arches rose over a paved road which travelled uphill at a steep angle - the coachman was having to urge the horses on with harsh language and the whip.Gates were set into the archways, which were being held open by servants of the same species as the coachman, standing to attention, their heads downcast in respect. Road, archways, and the walls on either side alike were built of the same massive brown blocks, exquisitely cut to Inca standards. Percival could see not a dribble of mortar anywhere.

Above him, the central spire of the Bridge, which could have housed the goldsmiths of the Ponte Vecchio and Rialto and the tanners of old London Bridge combined, soarded like a stone skyrocket, and was replaced by vaulted ceilings as he passed inside it, into a tunnel lit by the electric light he'd suspected from below.

And then the coach swept into a wide, circular courtyard lit impossibly by the perfect blue of a summer sky.

The coach rumbled to a halt. Crickets and cicadas buzzed. There was a smell of summer in the air. The footman opened the door of the coach and stood respectfully waiting for Percival to exit. Not wishing to offend, he did so. His sodden boots squelched on a Classical mosaic floor.

Outside, the walls were masked by an ionic colonnade, with ivy twined round its columns. A fountain tinkled pleasantly. The sky overhead was a pure cadmium blue. A bird fluttered overhead. There was an authentic sound of birdsong. Percival did not for a moment believe the bird was real.

"You are examining my sky in great detail. Is there something wrong with it?"

The voice came from behind him. He turned. The speaker was, apparently, human, a white male of average height and build, dressed as a gentleman should be, had that gentleman been four centuries out of date. There were hose. There was, as far as Percival understood the term, a doublet. There was even the vestige of a ruff. If a man in Elizabeth Tudor's court had been a quiet and businesslike dresser, he would have looked like this.

"There is nothing wrong with your sky", said Percival. "But it's not real."

"What makes you so sure?" said the newcomer. He had a tiny, painstakingly pointed beard, and an equally precise moustache.

"Because I can see the brushstrokes."

The Elizabethan clapped his hands and laughed. "Excellent! Hardly any man notices that detail! And it took an age."

"A curved-screen animation designed to repaint itself not only fast enough to resemble reality", said Percival, "but also literally. A living oil painting. Very impressive."

"Curved-screen animation", parroted the little courtier. "You people really are coming along up there. But why can't you simply accept that it's all done by magic?"

"There is nothing in here", said Percival, "that I can't understand, even if my species' technology can't do it yet."

"Your species? So you don't think I belong to your species?"

Percival cast a sour glance at the courtier. "What species would you have me believe you belong to?"

"Don't I look like a member of your species?"

"Indeed you do." Percival nodded up at the sky. "And that bird up there looks just like a bird."

"An interesting point." The courtier snapped his fingers; as if by magic, girls - very real-seeming, uncomfortably human and post-pubescent girls - ran in through the colonnade dressed in Greek togas, carrying a small table and chair, and food to go on the table. There were grapes. There was bread. There was cheese. None of the food on the table appeared to have once formed part of a bat or a person. The girls were all that girls should be, and Percival gaped openly. Seeing him gaping, they giggled.

"I see you yourself are perfectly human", said the courtier. "Unless the girls aren't human, obviously. They certainly seem human to me, in every particular; I have tried them out in all the ways familiar to humans." He stared after the girls' departing bottoms hungrily.

Percival fell on the food. He did not bother to sit down, but grabbed handfuls and set to devouring them unashamedly. It was only through a supreme effort of Christian willpower that he stopped himself from falling on the girls and devouring them too.

"And the cheese", said the courtier. "Is the cheese real, in your opinion?"

"Never mind real", mumbled Percival through huge mouthfuls of cheese, "perfectly authentic." He swallowed in a huge gulp, and then, remembering the legend of Proserpina, checked himself and said: "I'm certain the girls' dress was authentic too. After all, you've been down here a long time. Pretending."

"Pretending what?"

"Pretending to come from this planet."

The courtier's eyebrows raised. "I assume you have evidence to support these wild allegations?"

"You're capable of things - GULP - no human being is, or will be for at least a hundred years. If you built this place, this, this Abyss, you have control - GULP - over the structure of space-time. Time slows down here. And space here isn't as Euclid would have understood it either. I fell, by my own estimation, for hours in the V-2, travelling at over a thousand kilometres per hour. By the simplest of arithmetic, I should be somewhere near the Earth's core by now. So why aren't my eyebrows burning?"

The courtier shook his head, and frowned sadly. "I am afraid you accord me an honour I haven't earned. I did not construct the Abyss."

Percival talked with his mouth full. "Kane was of the same opinion."

"Kane has believed me to be an enemy of his people's god ever since our first meeting. I do try to oblige him. He believes his god built this place to keep me prisoner. Do you believe him?"

"I have no idea. But the things you're capable of doing...it was you who brought me back to life?"

The bearded Tudor nodded. "It's necessary with most people who stray down this far. The Abyss tends to kill them before they get to us."

"Bringing a dead man back to life is not a thing my people are currently capable of. But it's a thing we can imagine how to do. It's not a thing totally beyond my comprehension."

"Fascinating! How, then, would you do it?"

Percival thought for a moment. "That warm glow that surrounds people who are being rebuilt - that's excess heat being given off by some sort of nanotechnological machine, sorry, machines, billions of them, shouldn't wonder. That's why everyone coughs down here - not airborne batshit, we're breathing in millions of little nanorobots. The Black Smoke, that must be a variety of them. For you people to be able to heal instantly and miraculously anywhere down here - which seems to be the case - you'd have to be walking around constantly surrounded by clouds of them. The hot dry feeling on the skin when someone in the same room is reconstructing - that's your nanomachines obtaining the energy for the process. Nuclear fusion, drinking up all the water in the air for its hydrogen. Giving off free oxygen, which accounts for the light-headed feeling. Giving off excess heat, as no machine is perfectly efficient. Am I right?"

The courtier considered this. "Whether you're right or no, I'm impressed by the scientific levels you people are attaining. You might present some serious competition given another couple of centuries. You speak so glibly of...I have never heard that term before, 'nanorobots'..."

"At present, nanotechnology is more a theoretical field than a practical one with us. With you, it seems to be different."

"So you claim to be able to understand a thing you are not yourself capable of doing."

Percival looked up at the oil-painting sky. "I can understand how a bird can fly, even if I can't do so myself."

"I would imagine you must be an educated man in order to make such leaps of understanding."

"My college degree was in chemistry. I'm a scientist by training."

"That explains your lack of faith. Why can you simply not accept that I am the Lord of Hades, the King of the World, Old Nick, Old Hob, Dis Pater, the Enemy of Mankind? Then I can accept your signature on the dotted line and take your soul for all eternity."

"Because after I did my degree in physics, I took orders in the Church of England. As a chemist, I can tell you gold from iron pyrites. As a chaplain, I can tell the Devil from a man in a mask. If you're going to pretend to be a figment of a Judaeo-Christian religion's perfervid imagination, at least get it right. Firstly, if you've 'tried your girls out in all ways familiar to humans', you're not the Devil. It is well known to the Church that the Devil cannot conduct himself familiarly with a woman through the normal marital channel, which is reserved for Christian lovemaking. Satan is condemned to forever come in via the tradesman's entrance. Secondly, is Kane who Kane seems to be?"

The putative demon nodded. Percival nodded back. "Then if you were the devil, God could not have built Hell to keep you prisoner by the time you first met Kane. You meet Kane in Genesis, and Satan is still God's willing servant in the book of Job. In the New Testament, even, come to that. And thirdly, it's a widely accepted theological point that it is impossible for the devil to take a man's soul simply by getting him to sign on any dotted line, unless he signs in the blood of freshly slaughtered children or some such substance. The act of signing has to itself constitute an irretrievably damning sin. So there."

The courtier's eyes bulged in their sockets. "Most impressive. I shall not lightly cross swords with the Church in future. In any case, we shall speak further on this matter." The Shakespearean clicked his fingers, and the world went black, to be replaced by the barren bone gravel drive outside the tavern, a sky of bioluminescent stars on a firmament of stone, and a cold, cold wind blowing out of Hell. Ahasuerus and Kane were standing in front of him with faces of concern.

"Are you all right, lad?" said Kane.

***

Percival felt himself to check none of his parts had been subtracted, and felt himself sway giddily. "Fine...so he can do things I can't understand. All he has to do is snap his fingers, and I zip from one place to another."

Kane shook his head. "I have never seen him do any such thing. The German thought it had happened too, called it teleportatsion. But it ain't. All that happened was that a couple of his servants brung you here and stood you up while you recovered consciousness." He spun Percival round to see a coach bearing the arms of the Angel of the Pit trundling away up the roadway to the Bridge.

"He put me to sleep", said Percival, rubbing his head to clear it.

"No", said Kane. "He killed you. Then he had your body brung down here. Then he unkilled you. He likes folk to know where they stand on the living and dying issue."

"How did he appear to you?" said Ahasuerus.

Percival thought about this. "He was a man my size, spoke my language. Yes. He spoke English. Not Latin or Greek or Aramaic. Dressed like a sixteenth-century nobleman."

"He was not always like that", said Kane. "When I first met him, he was a big black man wearing furs."

"To me", said Ahasuerus, "one of my own people, an Israelite. He spoke like a man of Jericho."

"But lately he seems to have become happy with the man the Franj calls 'Le Marinier', said Kane. "He has worn that face for the greater part of four hundred years now. I get the feeling it's some sort of private joke."

Percival tried to move his legs, found he could. There was a pins-and-needles feeling, and a numbness, but it was clearing. "The Franj? Who's he?"

"He came down in a device he called a montgolfière", said Kane.

"That would be a balloon", said Percival.

"Un ballon, yes", parroted Kane. "That is the other word he uses. He is a very clever man. He is the only one who ever arrived here alive, by letting air slowly out of his montgolfière."

"He is the cleverest of us all, and the youngest", said Ahasuerus. "In terms of purely temporal age", he clarified. "Apart from yourself and the German", he added.

"The Franj would very much like to talk to you", said Kane. "Both of them would, he and the German. They live not far from here. Will you come?"

Percival felt the cold of the under earth seeping back in to his limbs after the initial warmth of reconstruction. "Do they have a fire?"

"Right now, with all the combustibles that have been raining from up top these last few days, a very good one."

"Then let us go right now", said Percival, "and sit in front of it.”

“YOU ARE GOING NOWHERE.” Percival heard the dull THUNK of the glittering skull sliding out of its housing on oiled runners, snapping its teeth once for the first hour. “THE WORKING DAY HAS JUST BEGUN.”

In between the two coachmen, behind Percival, stood what appeared to be a human being; a man of rather less than average height, dressed in a uniform similar to the footmen who flanked him, only with appreciably more gold and silver thread. The tabard he wore, like that of the footmen, was inscribed with a crest depicting a winged Abaddon.

"Well met", said the figure. Percival noticed that Kane and Ahasuerus seemed to shrink back in his presence like guilty children. "You've had your audience with Milord; that made you feel you are special and valued. Let me now disabuse you of that illusion. I am Milord's executive branch. It is my function to ensure things happen here when they should, and make them not happen when they should not. My name is Orpheus. You may", he said, puffing his chest up slightly, "have heard of me."

The ancient Thessalian hero, mythological serenader of Cerberus, rescuer of Eurydice, stared hard at Percival.

Percival blinked dumbly. "Can't say I have.” He stared up at the clock. “Are we on Roman time, then?”

The little hell-creature nodded. “Yes. The day starts at the first hour. At dawn. And dawn, as you should know by now, happens when Milord says it does.”

Percival exhaled deeply against an overwhelming wave of fatigue. Resurrection was a terrible thing. He appeared to be suffering from something very similar to jetlag. If he had been resurrected with the same serotonin levels in his brain as he had died with, he must now biochemically be a man who had been awake for forty-eight hours longer than he had been alive.

"Look down", said Milord's executive branch.

Percival looked down. He was wearing a tabard exactly like that of Orpheus, only with appreciably less gold and silver thread.

"You are now wearing the Uniform", said the hero. "See that you are worthy of it. Roll call happens at low sand." He gestured across the square to the cuckoo clock. "At prima hora you will be issued your duties for the day, which you will perform to the best of your ability. Any remaining time is yours. Work well, and you will be rewarded, as I have been." He indicated his own finery, in which he looked quite ridiculous. "Work poorly, and you will be punished."

Percival thought about this.

"How?" he said.

The miniature commisar shifted nervously in his uniform. "What do you mean?"

"You can't kill me. Kane says none of us here can die. How are you going to punish me?"

A gloat stole across the baby face of the Greek. "Believe me, there are men in Milord's custody who wish fervently and constantly that they were dead."

"All day every day", said Kane mournfully. "And I'm not even in custody", he added.

"Not yet", warned the baby face.

"Canning it now, sir", said Kane. "Putting a sock in it. Zipping it most securely."

"So", said Percival, "what are my duties for the day?"

"Milord's automatic systems have scoured the lake for debris from the recent conflagrations upstairs. However, a final manual analysis on the ground -"

"- below the ground", corrected Kane.

"- is still in progress. Some of the heavier pieces also require manual retrieval. None of them, before you ask, Kane, are human." Orpheus turned to Percival. "He was so hoping you'd be an attractive young lady, so he could have screwed you and strangled you before bringing you back in."

"And you were hoping he'd be an attractive young man, Greek boy", muttered Kane.

"Right, that's it." Orpheus clicked pudgy fingers, and his satyr footpersons sprang to action, flanking Kane. "Take him upstairs", said Orpheus with venom, "to the Cellars." He swivelled to Percival again while the foot-beings manhandled Kane. "There are other duties - the sluices require constant manning, there is a perpetual need for building maintenance, Milord's stables need tending -"

"The horses are real?" Percival was flabbergasted.

"Of course they are real. Milord does not deal in half measures. And you will also find", said the malignant midget, "that their shit is real." Theatrically, he tossed Percival a shovel. Percival caught it, by the wrong end.

"There is a good deal of horse's ass product on this street already today. Some of it has been left so long it's grown two legs and is walking around emulating people." He cast a coprophobic glance at Ahasuerus, who attempted to cringe into invisibility. "You'll only be working on the legless stuff. Good day."

He turned on his heel in the bone dust and stalked back to his enormous glittering carriage. Demons held velvet curtains open for him as he climbed inside, a satyr footman cracked a whip on real horses' backs, and real rickety wooden wheels wobbled away.

***

"So what do I do now?" said Percival.

"Lose the uniform", said Ahasuerus. "Do you see any of us wearing it? Claim it was stolen by anti-Abaddonist extremists while you were in the shower."

Percival sniffed the air disbelievingly. "You guys shower?"

"No. And Him Upstairs knows we don't. But we don't wear his uniform either."

"Couldn't I just...accidentally scuff it up?"

Ahasuerus stared down at the uniform with venom. "Try it. Go on. Try it."

Percival looked down at his tabard. He picked a likely spot on the pocket where it looked easy to tear apart. And indeed, it was. The threads came apart with the ease of fresh bread. Then they flared emerald, like a fistful of fibre optics, criss-crossing over one another to reform the weave. Within seconds, the pocket was one piece again.

"Made of the same stuff", said Ahasuerus in disgust, "as we are. If you wear the uniform, you're one of his. If you eat his food, you're one of his. If you sleep on his big fancy beds with the big fluffy pillows and the individually pocketed springs", he said, licking his lips, his eyes misting over, "you're one of his. Live down here in righteous misery", he said mournfully, "and you're one of us."

Percival hefted his shovel experimentally. "So you deliberately mortify yourselves, just to show him you're not his servants."

"Occasionally", said Ahasuerus, "I has a moment of weakness, and nips up to the Bridge and becomes his despicable tool for a week or so. Then I has a moment of strength and does something unpardonable, and gets banished forever back down here. Most of us do much the same."

"What sort of duties do you have to do, while you're his despicable tool?"

"Oh, nothing much. Strutting around, giving orders. Wearing uniforms. Beating carpets. Polishing silver. Torturing the occasional miscreant."

"Beating carpets?" Percival stared up at the glittering city of the Bridge, occupying the entire Abyss above him like a giant turbine in a shaft. "Hasn't he ever heard of Electrolux?"

"He believes in the purifying effect of honest manual labour."

"Shit-shovelling", said Percival.

"What does not kill you", said Ahasuerus, "only makes you stronger." He stared down at his hands, which were shaking with age. "My, how strong I must be by now."

"So, where are Milord's stables?"

"Follow the coach. If the coach ain't visible, follow the line of horse shit. There's only one. The horses only ever come down here, turn round and go back. Not room for but one road down here."

***

Milord's stables were recessed into the rock, but dry and electrically lit. The horses were feeding on what appeared to be hay, had enough room to pace around in, and seemed to be in what Percival took to be a healthy condition for horses. The stable entrance was a low yellow-lit opening halfway up the great zig-zagging roadway that reached up the rock to the Bridge buttresses. Such were the constraints of space that the roadway, despite all Milord's advanced technology, only had room for one lane of carriage traffic, though there were occasional passing places. Percival had been forced to jump aside smartly on one occasion when a carriage came thundering down at breakneck speed pulled by lathered and terrified horses, their shoes striking sparks from off the cobbles. Rather than apologizing, the demon driver had attempted to swing a whip at him.

There were other stablehands scurrying about already, carrying tack, mucking out stalls, grooming horses. The horses appeared healthier than their human handlers, standing taller than Percival at the shoulder, mowing their way through their feed with teeth like scytheblades. The master of the stables, meanwhile, was a black silhouette against blinding electrical-filament light, standing hands clasped behind his back, looking in Percival's direction. It was clear that he was wearing a Uniform, on which the light from behind him sparkled. Rows of silver buttons punctuated the front of his tabard, and his beard was neatly trimmed.

"Mr. Percival. We have been expecting you."

Percival's jaw dropped.

"Kane?"

"The very same."

"But they took you upstairs, to the cellars!"

"I arranged a little subterfuge in order to save myself the shame of everyone knowing I was entering Milord's service again. Every few weeks or so a man finds himself hankering for the good life." He breathed on a button on his coat, and buffed it vigorously. "A good bed, good food, female company." He leaned forward and whispered conspiratorially, "there are women in the Bridge."

"I did wonder at that", said Percival. "I saw no women on the Mole."

"Statistical analysis shows that ninety per cent of people who fall or climb down the Abyss to this depth are men, for whatever reason - possibly that women have more sense than to go falling into holes. Women are at a premium, and Milord retains them for his own uses, which are principally those of keeping us under control."

"So", said Percival, "if there are men and women, are there children?"

"Goodness gracious no. Imagine, in an undying population. Malthus would have a field day." Kane strolled across the floor and scratched a horse behind the ears. It puffed appreciatively like a large bay steam engine.

"The horses - can they die?"

"I believe so. Lucky devils. Occasionally a human coachman goes completely bananas and puts a coach over the side. Invariably, we find him days later, shivering on a ledge half a mile down, covered in splintered wood and horseflesh, pathetically regenerated. Milord reserves special punishments for such people. He understands our enmity towards him, but believes it is not fair to involve the horses. Besides, it takes him a long time to replace them." He looked back at Percival. "Well, Mr. Percival. I believe you have been supplied with a shovel. Employ it."

He walked away, then looked back over his shoulder.

"I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't mention my being here to the others."

***

The horses of hell did not resemble any on earth. One of the stablehands, a Latin-speaking Mongol who had been hurled into the Abyss for unofficial looting during the sack of Na, informed Percival that they had been bred continuously down here for as long as horses had been in the upstairs world, and using techniques far more radical than simple selective breeding. Their coats were black as oil, shimmering with moiré patterns. Their eyes were red as coals, possibly the result of some sort of albinism. And they were huge, measuring more hands than existed on an Indian idol - Great Horses, Percherons, Shire Horses, whatever. Horses of this size had carried mediaeval knights into battle, towed mouldboard ploughs along fields a furrow long and a rood wide, and been the earliest four-legged tanks in the world when manned by Persian cataphract cavalry.

They also had very sharp teeth; and any fingers they bit off, they swallowed with every sign of enjoyment. Percival estimated he lost two fingers in the first hour, though they grew back instantaneously before his marvelling eyes.

The horses also produced prodigious quantities of shit. Percival was shown a winding staircase on the outward-facing side of the stables which was bricked up and no longer in use; this was the original shit chute out of the building, which had been overwhelmed by horse manure deposits building up on the cliffs outside over so many thousand years. The secondary shit chute, which was now upstairs, was a noissome hole that stank vilely. His uniform sleeve over his face in order to make sure the only stench he breathed was his own, Percival looked out over a glistering faecal landscape of saltpetre crystals plated hard to the rock like snow. And even at this depth, there were flies - untold billions of them, the slope downhill from the stables one putrid avalanche of maggots. The inside of the stables was oddly fly-free. Percival was tempted to think this was due to some application of high technology, then thought better of it and suspected instead the use of life-threatening quantities of insecticide.

The horses were named by the head groom, a short, thick-set man with a peculiarly elongated skull, which Percival considered might be some form of birth defect. The other grooms whispered that he been a chieftain of sorts among the Huns; after being taken ill whilst bedding a concubine late in life, he been issued with a form of cataleptic drug by his soothsayers and buried alive, and his coffin had been propelled to the edge of the Na Abyss and hurled down into the depths. The coffin, Percival was told by junior grooms who spoke of their superior only in whispers, had been in three caskets made of iron, gold and silver. Percival remembered army packing crates, made to survive drops from helicopters, that had had several layers separated by polystyrene packing. Possibly the soothsayers had had some inkling of what lay at the bottom of the Abyss.

The groom had a large head, a swarthy complexion, and small, deep-set eyes. His nose was Asiatic in its flatness, and his beard in its sparsity; he had a peculiar capability to terrify the junior grooms, who were men no threat of physical damage should have been capable of terrifying. He had made the task of naming the horses easy for himself, Percival was told, by always giving the horses the same names, which were 'Those of the Kings of the World' - Theodosius, Valentianus, Huangdi, Mahomet, Ashoka and Satan. Percival remembered Satan being referred to in Christian mythology as King of the World. There were also two brood mares named Honoria and Ildico, and a couple of foals, Valentinianulus and Little Satan, bright-eyed lumps of fuzz moving about on legs like bundles of sticks. The two biggest and youngest stallions, Mahomet and Satan, were too big to be harnessed to any of the gleaming carriages kept in the stable garage; when Percival asked what they were used for, he was simply told they had been 'bred for other purposes'. The horses were exercised by being galloped daily up and down the long series of zigzags that joined the nearest of the Bridge's buttresses to the ramshackle village on the Mole below. Their horseshoes, as befitted animals being ridden hard over stone, were made of an elastic alloy that compressed and abraded like iron, yet also took a polish like table silver. It was one of Percival's tasks to polish them to a brilliant and unnecessary sheen. He made the mistake of standing behind a horse once as he was doing so, and woke up on the stable floor, looking into the squash-ball-sized eye of Mahomet as he stripped fingers off Percival's left hand like berries from a bush, one of his hooves planted solidly in the centre of Percival's stomach, holding him down like a lion pinning down an antelope. Curiously, possibly because he had expected the pain to be excruciating, Percival felt no pain, even though he was watching his own ribcage heal and re-knit in a glowing tracery of emerald. The other stablehands were watching indolently, knowing he would struggle to his feet eventually, not wanting to incur the wrath of the massive animal themselves.

Eventually, Etzel, the head groom, chased the creature away with a besom, and Percival was left staring at his own reforming fingers, entirely certain that he was in the wrong profession.

***

It was a long trudge down from the stables at the end of the day, which was signalled by the electric lights in the stable roofs dimming to a nocturnal purple. Other stablehands accompanied Percival as he slung his shitshovel over his shoulder and began the journey home. He reflected that actually had no idea where home was, as he had been given no idea where he should sleep, eat, or even defecate, but blind human loyalty propelled him down towards the village on the Mole, rather than up towards the brilliant citadel of the Bridge. He imagined he might be turned away in either place.

About halfway down the slope leading down to the village, a cart rumbled in their direction from stablewards, driven by a lone footman in Abaddonian livery. The cart was not well-appointed - only four long boards formed a rough corral around it to stop passengers falling out as it swayed dangerously back and forth over the precipice. It had some sort of primitive braking system on its wheels, which hissed like asthmatic serpents and produced smoke and steam as it was applied before every corner.

"Up and aboard, human vermin", yelled the driver. "And be thankful for milord's generous heart. He can ill afford to spare transport at the best of times."

Percival climbed up next to the driver, whose voice he was oddly certain he recognized. Leaning close to the other man rudely in the gloom, he examined him in detail.

"Stare any harder and you'll lose an eyeball to my whip", raged the driver unconvincingly.

"Ahasuerus?" said Percival. "Is that you?"

"Sssh!" hissed the hellish horseman. "Not so loud!" Then, his voice becoming wheedling and imploring, he added:

"Don't tell Kane, or I'll never hear the end of it. It's just the beds upstairs, you see. And the steak. I've been promised steak."

The cart rattled self-destructively to a halt. Percival was not sure, after the jarring his skeleton had taken, that walking would not have been preferable.

"Don't worry", he said. "Your secret's safe with me."

"You are a true friend", said Ahasuerus, and handed his reins and whip to a new passenger who had stolen furtively out of the dark to take his place on the buckboard. Ahasuerus then hopped down, and began furiously disrobing. When he had finally divested himself of the alien uniform, he threw it back up to the man who now held the reins, who began struggling into it.

"YAAA!" yelled the new coachman in triumph, and applied his whip to Ashoka and Huangdi, who were in the traces. The cart began to turn with molluscoid velocity out of the village square back up towards the stables.

Percival finally dragged his feet into the main and only street of the village; he was unprepared to be greeted by Kane, dressed in his usual rags.

"So!" said the proto-Hebrew accusingly. "You've entered the service of our great Enemy right from square one, I see. An unprepossessing start, I must say."

Hangers-on hissed in disapproval to right and left of Kane. Ahasuerus nipped into view at Kane's elbow and fixed Percival with a hard stare.

“I really do not care, right now”, said Percival, “about your pathetic inter-species rivalries. All I need, right now, is a nice comfy soiled privy floor on which to sleep.”

“We sleep”, said Kane, “where we fall. I cannot promise you anything as palatial as a privy floor.”

“Show me a coil of barbed wire, and I will sleep on it.”

“I will show you where you may sleep. You need sleep.”

“On that we are agreed.”

“You have much to do. You must redeem yourself. In the morning, or the evening, or whenever you eventually wake, you will come with me to see the Franj and the German.”