Ink and Steel (54 page)

This place smelled of leaf mold, of earthworms, of fresh-turned earth. Behind Kit, a gray light like morning was growing; he noticed when he glanced over his shoulder to see if the archway was still in sight, and did not look back a second time. He feared if he did turn he would keep turning, and keep walking, and never force himself downward again.

He counted as he descended.

On the one hundred and thirteenth step he lost the sound of hoofbeats. On the three hundred and eleventh step he lost the light. There was no railing; he leaned on the wall and felt for the edge of the step with his toe. The rattle of the iron nails in his boots gave him hope.

My father's hand.
In hope. And then, bitterly,
I saw the back side of it often enough.

He lost count.

His left hand fell on something leathery in the darkness; Kit jumped backward, squeaking like a wench who's brushed up against a rat in the cellar. He would have fallen—
Jesu
—all the bottomless way, but something moist and strong wrapped his wrist and pulled him hard against the wall. He grunted, scrabbled, found his footing with a twisted ankle that would have been much worse without the bracing of his boots.

A cold exhalation pressed his ear. The smell of loam and leaf mold redoubled; Kit held his breath until his heart no longer felt fit to leap through his chest. The predatory grip on his wrist never eased.

Another exhalation. A slow voice, inflectionless, half rumble and half hiss. “Who passes, and on what errand?” The demon's maw gleamed red when it spoke: the only light in the world, silhouetting serrated teeth as if on coals.

Kit swallowed.
This is real. Now
. “Marley.” The smallness of his own voice angered him. “I come to bargain with your master. Let me pass.”

“My master?” Silence, that Kit somehow knew was laughter. He wondered if the thing saw his own face lit red when its mouth opened. “My master treats with none that can not pass by me.”

Kit himself glimpsed nothing but the fangs.
It can see in the dark,
he realized. “Must I fight you, then?”

“You must pay the toll,” the demon said, releasing his wrist quite negligently. “What will you pay it with?”

Kit crowded back against the far wall of the narrow stair. He laid a hand on the hilt of his blade, did not yet dare draw it.
Well, I won't offer you the pound of flesh nearest my heart, and that's for certain.
“That depends on the going rate.” It was eerie speaking so, as if the blackness itself could hear him and answer.

“ 'Tis easier to buy thy way
in
to Hell than out,” the demon allowed. “Your remaining eye, perhaps? Your good right hand?”

Kit blinked, understanding.
Just Like bargaining in the marketplace. I'LL not be thee'd down to by demons, either—
“I'm surprised thou didst not commence with mine immortal soul.”

“Ah,” the demon said, casting a glare as it licked its maw with a lingering tongue. Light between its teeth like pipe smoke; Kit caught a swift impression of clawed leathery paws, of scaled masculine tits and paunch over hair-thatched legs. The demon was impressively, unpleasantly male. “No such delicacies for me. But a taste of sweet man flesh—” It shrugged. “Or of a sweet, tight arse—”

Kit pressed himself against the wall and pulled his sword into his hand, the scrape of metal on scabbard reassuring. “My flesh is not for dining on.”

Scales rasped on stone; hair rubbed on hair. Kit forced himself to look where the thing's mouth and, he supposed, its eyes would be, and not strain at the darkness for another glimpse of its talons or its forked, knobby member. It chuckled through its nose, a dying-ember glow limning its nostrils.

Kit swallowed hard. “Or any other sport thou mightst desire to make upon it.”

“Pity,” the thing said, its voice very close, the coals in its belly glaring. Kit tasted its cold breath on his face. “That blade is Faerie silver, mortal man.”

“Aye.” Kit brandished it at nothing, felt the tip prick nothing and slide through. A heavy slick sound, and he knew the thing had sidestepped upward. Kit turned to cover it with the blade, boots clattering on the steps. He kept his blind eye to the wall, although it restricted his sword arm; he suspected the sword wouldn't help him much, all in all.

“The sword will do for payment.” The demon opened its mouth wide, the glow revealing more than Kit desired to see.

“And when thou hast it?”

“Thou mayst pass freely.”

“And return?”

That silence that was laughter; the tilt of the scaled, fanged head. Horns broad as a bull's caught the unholy light. “That,” the thing said, “is my master's to decide.”

Well enough,
Kit said, and reversed the sword in his hand to offer it to the demon.

“Pass,” the thing said, and struck its fist against the wall.

Pallid and silver, starlight spilled through the opening.
A doorway,
Kit realized, and started forward, curiously lighter without his rapier.

He half expected the demon to snatch him back by the scruff, but he passed through unmolested and the stone of the wall ground closed like a prison door. Kit found himself standing in the midst of a vast blank plain, his nailed boots his only security on the slick surface beneath him. He could no longer hear the gay peal of hoofbeats on stone, and an ashen glow like starshine filled the air from no identifiable source, omnidirectional, shadowless. Some distance ahead, he saw the rippling movement of water between smooth, low banks.
Styx?
he wondered.
Acheron? Cocytus or Lethe, perhaps; not Phlegethon. No sign of fire.

A shadow moved across it; the outline of a ferryman, tall and stooped, bent to the pole. Kit felt for his purse; there was gold in it enough to pay the passage there and back, he hoped. Boots skidding on the glasslike landscape beneath his feet, he struck out cautiously for the water's edge.

Kit watched his feet at first, until he saw vaporous things moving beneath the landscape like drowning men clawing under clear, thick ice. He wrenched his eyes upward; the shadows flinched when he walked across them, and yet they pressed their vaporous hands, their hollow-socketed faces against the barrier. He almost thought he heard them pleading, screaming. They swarmed after him like trout swirling toward crumbs cast on water: arms outreached in supplication, faces averted in pain.

He slipped sideways, almost went down. Then placed his feet the way Will did when Will was tired and staggering; short steps, straight up and down like walking on icy cobbles. He fixed his eyes on the ferryman poling to meet him and found his lips shaping Latin words. “Pater noster qui es in cœlis, Sanctificetur nomen tuum. Adveniat regnum tuum. Fiat voluntas tua, sicut in cœlo, et in terra—” He bit his cheek until blood flowed, and couldn't silence the litany.
Panem nostrum quotidiamum da nobis hodie et dimitte nobis debita nostra, sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris. Et ne nos inducas in tentationem. Sed Libera nos a malo. Oremus.

“Christ on the cross.”

Kit walked, exertion warming his body, failing to numb his thoughts. The words were as unstoppable as the gray water rippling in the haunting light so far ahead. He heard both parts of the litany, prompt and response, as if two voices spoke within. He hadn't prayed so in— Hell, in eleven years and more.

“Deliver us from evil,” Kit scoffed aloud. “Useless, methinks, when I'm plain walking into it.” And yet he stopped and looked about, there on the barren moor of Hell, the damned writhing under his feet.
What, Kit? Art waiting for an answer?

“Oh, Sweet Christofer.”

An infinitely welcome voice from over his shoulder, and he closed his eye a moment in joy and relief, unwilling to believe.

But the voice continued. “My love, you came.”

“Will.” He turned, and looked up into his lover's face. “I can't believe it. It worked.”

Will's smile folded the corners of gray-blue eyes. He raised his arms, and Kit came into them, lifting his mouth for a kiss that was suddenly the only thing in all the world he wanted.

“Thou hast forgiven me,” Kit said, when the kiss was ended and still his lover held him tight.

“Thou dost taste of ashes,” Will said, stepping back. “Was the way very long? Thou shouldst drink—”

“Ashes to ashes,” Kit answered, releasing Will only with reluctance. “Drink of that river? I think not.” Kit turned to look upon it, putting Will on his blind side. Kit frowned with cracked lips, scrubbing sore, itching palms. “What river is it?”

“What does it matter? Thou must drink—”

“—nay—”

“—else thou canst not stay here with me.”

Kit blinked. He tasted blood from his bitten cheek.
Deliver us from evil.
He rubbed his hand across his lips, startled when red blood streaked his glove.

No. Not from his cheek. From his lips, from his tongue.

He turned his hand over, gasped when he saw the burned-through palms of his gloves, the blistered flesh of his palms, the smoldering scorches on his doublet where it showed under the patchwork of his cloak. His cloak smoked too, but seemed unharmed, and the flesh beneath it was not burning. Kit raised his eyes; something red and supple as a lizard winked at him with a slitted yellow eye, gleaming in colors like fire.

“Salamander.”

“Ifrit,” it said with a mocking bow, flickering through shapes like a windblown torch—a red-haired woman, a stallion with a mane aflame, a dragon no bigger than a hummingbird. “I am the second guardian. I'll have your cloak before you pass.”

Kit drew it close about his shoulders with his blistered hand. “This cloak that saved me from you?”

“Aye, well,” the ifrit answered. “There's a price for everything. You'll also need to pay the ferryman.”

Kit thought of edging past it. Sparks flashed from its eyes; it grew again into the image of Will Shakespeare, but flames flickered at its fingertips. He saw that the damned underfoot squirmed away from its footsteps, huddling behind Kit as if Kit could defend them.

“This cloak is valued of me,” Kit said.

“That's why it buys you passage.” The ifrit extended an imperious hand. “ 'Tis that, or thy smoking heart. Thou goest before my master clad in thine own power only, and nothing borrowed may come.”

“Ah,” Kit said, and shrugged the heavy cloth off of his shoulders. He folded it over his arm, twice and then again, running his fingers over scraps of velvet and silk and brocade.
Thank you, Morgan. Thank you, Master Troll.
“I'll have it back when I return.”

“Perhaps,” the ifrit said, and plucked the cloak off Kit's arm. Both cloak and spirit vanished in a swirl of hot wind and shadows, and Kit swore under his breath.

Lighter still, he walked to the ferry. It seemed easier now; he closed the distance in the space of a few heartbeats, and stood waiting while the boat grounded on the glassy shore and the ropy, bare-chested figure at the pole beckoned.

Kit stepped over the gunnels and found a place near the prow, facing the pilot. “What is the fare, Master Ferryman?”

“The thing that you can least afford to lose,” the figure answered, scrubbing a hand over his bald scalp before pushing off. His trews seemed gray in the dim, directionless light, and they were rolled almost to the knee and belted with a bit of ivory rope. His horny feet were bare.

No rope bound the ferry on its path too and fro—and yet the boat cut clear and straight across the rushing river, making a clean angle to the farther shore. “What river is this?” he asked, once the ferryman had settled into a rhythm.

“Lethe.”

Kit licked blistered lips. “So the ifrit urged me drink.”

“Drink, and forget all pain.”

Kit leaned back against the bow. The bank they had left retreated rapidly. He turned to look over his shoulder; the far bank seemed no nearer. “All pain. All joy. No, thank you.”

The ferryman poled in silence for a little. “You were eight years old in 1572.”

“I turned nine—”

“At the end of it, aye. But in November? December?”

“I had measured eight summers. Aye. How do you know me so well, Master Ferryman?”

“It is my task to know. Do you remember what was special about that Christmas, Master Poet?”

Kit thought back. “The new star. Bright orange, it was. Visible by daylight—”

“Aye. A new star in the heavens. A change upon the face of what many said was ineluctable destiny. It tormented the learned astrologers greatly.”

Kit swallowed frustration; even though he spoke, the man poled fast. Surely they must be nearing the far bank shortly. He turned, and was surprised by the distance still to cover. “What purpose these questions?”

“Idle conversation,” the ferryman said, and fell silent.

Kit glanced over his shoulder again. “How wide is this river, Master Ferryman?”