The Third Way: ZARENYIA, PRINCESS OF HELL

 

The land of the infinite cemetery sloped downward and so they descended the gentle gradient—the necromancer, the witch, and the devil. They spoke little and all proved curiously unobservant as the dank earth gave out to sand beneath their feet, a fine pale powder moderated with larger, dark red grains that glistered like wet blood and made the landscape revealed before them sparkle and shimmer. Johannes Cabal reflexively deployed his spectacles of blue glass, Miss Smith squinted, and Zarenyia hummed ‘By Jingo’ for lack of any other outlet for her customary garrulousness.

As the soil became sand, the tombs and crypts of the benighted place grew larger and windows made an appearance in their structures, so that by degrees they became houses and then mansions and palaces, and so the grey-blue sky became the dull maroon of a persistent headache.

Then … a tic of perception, and all three of the travellers realised the subtle changes wrought around them in an instant. They drew to a halt and looked about them in differing degrees of nonchalance.

Miss Smith uttered an oath to make porters and fishwives blush. Cabal grimaced and made reference to the loss of beloved verisimilitude. Zarenyia crossed her arms across her chest and declared she had been to this place before, but, ‘It’s changed. It shouldn’t look like this. Why are the manses ruined? Why is everything derelict? Where is everyone?’

‘Where are we, exactly?’ It was Cabal who spoke, although he was already reasonably sure he knew the answer.

‘Why, it’s Hell, dear heart,’ replied Zarenyia, surprised at such apparent naivety. ‘Isn’t it obvious?’

‘Why should this be any more Hell than that cemetery was my necropolis?’ said Miss Smith. Cabal raised his eyebrows to Zarenyia as if to say, Why indeed? For her part, Zarenyia had the faintest impression that the humans were ganging up on her, and she did not care for the experience in the slightest.

She sniffed and pointed at a great building constructed largely of rusted iron and bloodshot tachylyte, the massive blocky structure of the former, the aggressive ornamentation of the latter. The place was not, to coin a phrase, in fine fettle. The fifty-yard-long spears that once formed a close cage around the mansion had fallen away in a tumble of linearities, giving the place the air of a game of spillikins abandoned by Titans.

‘That’s Balberith’s palace. Stabby, isn’t it? But look at the state of it! Yes, he may be all about murder and argumentation and suchlike, but he’s frightfully house-proud. What has happened here?’

Cabal regarded the ruin with equanimity. Over to the right he saw another glorious mansion brought low perhaps by violence or merely time. A once-glorious thing of cherry-red and white marble, it stood skewed as if Gog and Magog had leaned heavily upon its eaves. Statuary of a licentious sort lay scattered about, brokenly wanton. ‘That would be the house of Lilith?’

‘Oh, she’ll be livid when she sees her place in that state,’ Zarenyia confirmed, albeit not without a very distinct lamina of schadenfreude. ‘Ah, me. Quel dommage.’

‘You’re smirking.’

‘I know.’

Any further badinage was quelled by the sight of dust, a plume like dried blood, growing on the near horizon. ‘Something’s coming,’ said Cabal.

‘You say that as if it’s a bad thing,’ replied Zarenyia, never shy of the opportunity to deploy a double entendre, or a single entendre, or occasionally just to chat about penises and orgasms with forensic specificity.

‘How to characterise our situation? I am unpopular with Satan, you are exiled from the rings of Hell without good cause, and Miss Smith’—he glanced at her, and she returned it with an expression of expectant curiosity—‘Miss Smith is … I don’t know, but I do not think much of her chances when confronted by a herd of intemperate demons, either, nonetheless.’

‘I may be very dangerous, for all you know, Cabal,’ said Miss Smith. ‘They may run screaming from my magic.’

‘Might they?’

‘They might. Or, they may not.’ She looked back in the direction from which they had come, but the last signs of the great cemetery had faded like a verbal contract. ‘Is it too late to start running?’

‘Run? From a hullabaloo? Never!’ Zarenyia turned to face the approaching welcoming party. ‘Unless they’re terrifically dangerous. Run like the wind in that case.’ She noticed Cabal looking at her lower body. ‘Oh, darling, not now! What an awful time for you to take an interest! Hullabaloo!’

‘I was just wondering if this would be a good time for you to assume your arachnid form, madam. Helpful for both combat or flight, assuming one or the other proves necessary.’

‘Really? That’s the only reason you were looking at my skirt?’ Zarenyia was visibly dismayed. When she spoke again, it was with some disappointment in her voice. ‘I’ll pop out the other limbs at the right moment. Element of surprise and all that. Speaking of which, have you brought your wand with you?’

‘Wand?’ Miss Smith was shocked, wands being for mountebanks, hedge wizards, and even necropolis witches, not scientifically minded necromancers.

‘I have not,’ said Cabal, a little quickly. ‘I had no reason to do so. There is little stuff of chaos around here upon which a wand might work.’

‘Oh, that’s a shame.’ Zarenyia spoke past Cabal to Miss Smith. ‘He cuts such a fine figure with his little stick in his hand, waving it around.’

Cabal may have blushed. Under the light of that hellish vault it was hard to tell. ‘Ladies! Pray pay attention to—’

The demons arrived.

*   *   *

Cabal regarded them with freezing disdain. ‘What do you monstrosities want?’

They were unedifying creatures, true, but at least there were only two of them. One was a herpetologist’s worst nightmare; an otherwise interesting bipedal lizard that had suffered some sort of terrible internal tumour. The cancer had grown and spread until it filled the reptile’s body, misshaping it, wrecking its symmetry, making it grossly rounded, grotesquely distended in its limbs, given it a bubbled, cyst-racked skin, insanely mismatched eyes, a bad haircut, a small moustache, its breath disagreeable, its diction regrettable.

‘Oh, he called us “monstronities”, De’eniroth, didja ’ear ’im?’ it said.

The second demon was taller, thinner, and generally less tumorous. This ended the list of its charms. It took the form of a great, stringy maggot, some ten feet long, that bent in a loose S shape, the lowest straight furnished with an indeterminate number of little legs that propelled it along upon a carpet of fairy steps. The upper body bore a pair of arms that would have given a tyrannosaurus an unaccustomed frisson of superiority in the upper-arms department, white ropes of ganglion and muscle that ended with tiny clutching hands that, for the demon’s sake, one hoped were more practical than they appeared. The demon had no head per se, but only a gullet within which rings of teeth spun slowly and wetly counterwise to their neighbours. If it had eyes, they were not evident. Perched high upon the corpse-pale brow immediately above the gaping maw was a brown trilby of the sort preferred by bookies.

‘Hur-hur. “Monstronities”. Hur,’ it said.

Cabal somehow held his temper. He disliked being toyed with at the best of times, and this particular circumstance was trying his patience badly. He would have suspected the hand (or tentacle, or waving tendril of materialised thought) of Nyarlathotep behind this but for the lack of a characteristic atmosphere of trifling sadism. No, this place—like its predecessor—was nothing but a morality tale wrought in broad strokes and bright colours.

‘And what are you called?’ he asked the first demon. ‘De’zeel or something similar?’

The cancerous lizard looked at him with evident astonishment. Then, rallying its limited powers of dissimulation, it said, ‘No.’

The maggot frowned, which was as unappealing as it sounds. ‘Isn’t it, De’zeel? Why did you tell me it was, then?’

While the lizard flapped its angular arms at the maggot and the maggot whipped its ropey limbs in defence, Miss Smith said in a voice that betokened both wonderment and disdain, ‘You know these things?’

Cabal shrugged the shrug of a man of substance discovered by his fashionable friends in the company of the family he’s been trying to disown since his teen years. ‘In a manner of speaking. This is an echo of my past. If the men involved had died and gone to Hell as they so richly deserved, then these are very likely the demons their souls might eventually have become.’

Miss Smith took a moment to absorb this information. ‘The human versions of them aren’t dead yet? In the real world, I mean. They still live?’

‘Oh, no,’ said Cabal, snorting a little at such credulity. ‘I killed them myself.’

It says little for the company of necromancers and, indeed, devils, that neither Miss Smith nor Zarenyia saw anything at all unusual or reprehensible in the statement.

‘Then, why couldn’t these actually be the demons created from their damned souls?’

‘Because their souls are still bottled up in their bodies. I needed some cheap labour … free labour … and they were handy and disagreeable. I had my pistol and reagents handy, so why not? I think it turned out to everyone’s satisfaction.’ His audience regarded him with suspicion. Cabal elucidated. ‘They got to drive a train. They’d never have done that were they still alive.’

Both Miss Smith and Zarenyia nodded with agreement; it was all perfectly reasonable, after all.

De’zeel stopped thrashing at De’eniroth, and both demons turned their attention upon the intruders.

‘We are guardians of this ’ole flank of ’Ell,’ said De’zeel, gesturing grandly over the glittering dunes. ‘Hidennfy yerselves, or we are hempowered by the Prince of ’Ell’—here he turned a jaundiced eye upon the party, jaundiced, sclerotic, bloodshot, and home to several bacterial conditions of which conjunctivitis was the very least—‘to do yer.’

‘Do our what?’ asked Zarenyia with professional interest.

‘Kill us,’ said Miss Smith.

Zarenyia wilted, this being the latest of her recent disappointments. Then she perked up. ‘Oh, wait. You’re threatening us?’ Her smile returned, a delightful expression filled with spring sunshine, heartfelt joy, and the imminence of wholesale slaughter.

‘Control yourself, madam,’ said Cabal. He turned to the demons, aware of and ignoring Zarenyia mimicking him behind his back. ‘You are to conduct us to the presence of His Infernal Majesty.’ He said it as if arranging an appointment to have the carpet shampooed. ‘What we have to discuss is for the ears of Satan only.’

De’eniroth gave the impression of blinking stupidly, despite the absence of obvious eyes. ‘’Oo?’

‘Satan,’ repeated Cabal, the word slowed with caution. ‘The Prince of Hell you just mentioned. He’s called Satan. That’s what he’s called.’ He looked from one idiot demon to the other and back again. ‘Lucifer? He’s called that sometimes. The Prince of Lies?’ Still no response. ‘What sort of demons are you if you don’t even know the name of your employer?’

‘Lucy-furr…’ The sound of De’zeel’s thought processes were almost audible, and would have seemed much like fracturing ice and old clockwork if they were. ‘I know that name.’ Suddenly he clicked his fingers, making a noise like crushing a louse the size of a tangerine in the process. ‘I do! That was the old boss.’ He grinned, and several tooth splinters oozed out on a string of drool. ‘’E’s gorn now. We’ve got a new bloke.’

‘What? How can there be a “new bloke”?’ demanded Cabal. ‘This isn’t some sort of corporation, subject to hostile takeovers. Even Hell isn’t that evil. The whole point of Hell is that it is and has always been Lucifer’s domain! What exactly is supposed to have happened to him? Revolution? Coup? An assassin angel came down from on high with a blessed elephant rifle? What?’

‘He retired.’ This said the lizard demon, and no more.

Cabal gawped, not something he was inclined towards in the usual run of things. ‘He did what?’

‘Retired. Said ’e’d ’ad enough, an’ chucked it in.’ De’zeel regarded the dumbstruck expressions of the humans (well, two out of three wasn’t bad) with pleasure. ‘Said the joke wos over an’ ’e wos done. Orft he went. Prob’ly got a cottage now. Cottages is nice.’

‘The joke?’ Cabal thought back, and then wondered how close an analogue this place was to the reality. Was this an echo of the true current state of Hell? If so had he, Cabal, inadvertently been instrumental in causing the greatest theological upset in … well … ever? It was a matter of the most monumental import. The opportunities were immense. New alliances could be forged, new paths opened. The vistas of potential research blooming before him, no matter what the outcome of the current expedition, were breathtaking. With Satan off looking after the roses around the door of his retirement cottage (Cabal guessed it would be in either Dis, Tartarus, or Essex; probably Essex), Cabal would be free to make overtures to the new management.

‘So,’ he said, ‘who is the new Prince of Hell?’

De’zeel and De’eniroth both huffed out their chests, made complex yet underwhelming salutes of obeisance to their ruler, and chorused, ‘His Infernal Majesty, Ratuth Slabuth!’

‘Shit,’ said Cabal.

‘Not a friend, darling?’ said Zarenyia. ‘Really, you should try being nice sometimes. I gather we’re back to Plan A?’ Without waiting for a reply she turned her attention to the demons and managed a smile no human could have managed in the face of the worst that both the vertebrate and invertebrate worlds could produce. ‘Hello, you sweet things. Quick question—do you both have anything that might equate to sexual organs?’ They seemed surprised by this tack and looked foolishly at her, a look much practised. ‘I mean, more or less. Just enough for a girl to…’ They still seemed very blank. She sighed. ‘You know what? Never mind answering. I’ll conduct an examination of my own. You just lie back and think of Gehenna.’

And so saying, Zarenyia shed her earthly form. Her extra legs erupted from her lower torso as she reared up, suddenly towering over the startled demons. Her abdomen seemed to swell out of nowhere, her clothes shredded into mist, and she stood triumphant and clearly outclassing De’zeel and De’eniroth in every conceivable category, a queen in chitin and angora.

Her smile was ravenous and vicious, the smile of a shark. ‘I am Zarenyia! Devil of the outer darkness where even demons fear to tread! I am the smiling death, the final embrace, the killing kiss! I bring the shuddering finality to my enemies! Unbeholden to the thrones of Hell, you have no defence from me, pit spawn!’ Her smile became a little more Women’s Institute. ‘So, I’d just pucker up and enjoy it, if I were you.’ She pointed at De’zeel, who stood rooted to the spot, his unlovely eyes wide with awe. ‘You first, poppet. You probably have more to work with. As for you’—she turned her attention to De’eniroth—‘just stay put until it’s your turn. No running away, or I’ll just have to run after you, and that will make me grumpy.’ Her smile hardened. ‘You don’t want to see me grumpy, believe you me.’

The demons looked at her in silence and then, very unexpectedly, fell to their knees. Or at least De’zeel fell to his knees. The situation was less clear-cut with De’eniroth, but he seemed to sink a little lower, and he curled his body around a little more so there was more on the lower side of the S of his body.

‘Mistress Zarenyia!’ they cried. ‘We must take you to the prince immediat’ly!’

‘Eh?’ said Zarenyia. ‘What?’

‘Your comin’ ’as been foretold, it ’as!’ said De’zeel. ‘You are most respectfully invited to the court of the new Great Satan his own self, Ratuth Slabuth!’

Zarenyia rested back on her haunches slightly in the manner of a toast rack being gently bent back, the better to regard the grovelling demons. Her brow harboured much in the way of suspicions. ‘Johannes, are these fellows committing some heinous and cunning ruse upon me?’

Cabal was as taken aback as she. ‘If they are anything like their mundane counterparts, they are severely lacking the wit for any scheme much more complicated than putting on their shoes.’

‘They’re not wearing shoes. The maggoty one would need several dozen little baby pairs, by the looks of him.’

‘I was talking metaphorically, madam. My point is, no, I doubt this is a scheme. Or, at least, not one they have evolved.’

Zarenyia digested this, then addressed the demons. ‘If I go with you, what happens to my travelling companions?’

De’eniroth and De’zeel looked at one another. ‘Dunno,’ said De’zeel after a short, wordless conversation with his colleague that largely consisted of shrugs. Maggots do not shrug convincingly. ‘But it’s really important you come wiv us, Mistress Zarenyia. ’Is Infernal Majesty is really, really keen to see you.’

‘What do you think, darlings?’ asked Zarenyia of her companions. ‘I mean, when all is said and done, this isn’t Hell. It’s more like improvisational theatre.’

‘That is no improvement,’ said Cabal.

‘Philistine. You know what I mean.’

Cabal nodded. ‘I do. There is a story to work out here, and running away from it will not resolve matters. Very well; we shall act in this play, though no one has seen fit to offer us a script.’

‘That’s the spirit! I’m rather enjoying all this, to be honest. We’re having fun, and I’ve met some of your friends and your brother, all of whom seem absolutely delicious.’ Here she favoured Miss Smith with a smile that left the necromantrix slightly breathless.

Zarenyia turned back to the demons, her smile now a beacon of complaisance. ‘Lead on, my sweets.’ They started to do so, but she stopped them. ‘One tiny proviso. Should it transpire that this is all some overture to a tedious trap of one sort or another…’ In a movement so rapid it blurred the thick air, she flipped De’eniroth onto his side and trapped one of his multitude of legs in a joint close to the end of her right foreleg. With no discernible effort and ignoring the agonised squeals of the demon, she scissored the limb off. She raised the miserable piece of flesh, speared on the leg’s tip. She was not smiling at all now. ‘I shall destroy you both in ways your fetid little minds could not conceive if you were a thousand times cleverer than you are. Which is to say, of roughly average intelligence. Johannes, tell them; do I follow through with my warnings?’

‘She does,’ he replied, a witness to one such event.

‘There.’ She flung the wiggling limb off into the distance, and she smiled brightly. ‘Now, let’s go and see the new boss, shall we?’

*   *   *

As they progressed in the wake of the demons De’eniroth and De’zeel—poor additions to an already displeasing vista—there was a muttered conference between the members of the mismatched little expedition.

‘Awful mess, isn’t it?’ Zarenyia indicated with a nod a palace that seemed to be in the progress of rotting. Tubules dangled haplessly in the fevered air, and ichor oozed from spiracles running in vague lines along the building—if building it truly was, and growth if it was not—pooling in lazy grey-green rivulets of filth. ‘That’s Beelzebub’s place.’

Miss Smith followed the nod. ‘Horrendous.’

Zarenyia cocked her head, considering the architecture. ‘Actually, that’s an improvement. But it’s still not supposed to look like that. What has happened here? It looks like a battlefield.’

‘You!’ said Cabal of the demons. The misshapen lizard looked back over its shoulder. ‘Why are the mansions of the princes in ruins? What has happened in Hell?’

‘Lucifer’s doin’, ain’t it?’ rasped De’zeel. ‘When ’e pigged off to take up watercolours or whatever ’e ’ad planned, ’e didn’t say ’oo was to take over, did ’e? Only left a constitutional crisis in ’is wake, selfish bugger. Owin’ to us not ’avin’ a constitution, ’part from the Abandon ’Ope thing, and that’s more like a advisory.’

‘No succession? What happened then?’

De’zeel pointed at the ruination of Hell. ‘Civil war, innit? “By the sword divided.” In ta lots of lickle bits, often as not.’

‘And, of all the Princes of Hell, Ratuth Slabuth came out on top?’ Cabal was having trouble with this idea. ‘Beelzebub, Lilith, Asmodeus, they ended up as also-rans, their mansions and palaces in ruins, and a ridiculous non-entity like Ratuth Slabuth gets the basalt throne?’ He shook his head. ‘He wasn’t even a prince! The last time I saw him, he was a corporal.’

De’zeel shrugged, an action that made his head bob upon the line of his shoulders like a dead pig in a cesspool. ‘Politics, innit? S’always politics.’ It was an analysis both cynical and sadly irrefutable.

Cabal gave up; these demons were clearly next to useless as sources of information, or most things. Instead he expressed his exasperation to Zarenyia and Smith. ‘Ridiculous. How could Lucifer just leave things in such a state?’ But his mind was already moving ahead and, if he was right about Lucifer, this had never been more than a sideshow to him in any case. He could have abandoned Hell just as easily as he abandoned any of his multitude of faces.

‘Who is Ratuth Slabuth?’ asked Miss Smith. ‘You seem to know a lot about him. I’ve never heard of him before.’

‘Used to be one of Lucifer’s generals,’ supplied Zarenyia, pleased to gossip. ‘For reasons I could never understand. Good at the bureaucracy, I suppose, and there was a period when Lucifer was very bureaucratically inclined. Pettifogging little brute, dotting and crossing his way up the ranks. I recall talk of him even being raised to a princedom.’

‘What happened?’

‘Blessed if I know, and as I find being blessed uncomfortable you may be sure I don’t. All of a sudden he was spectacularly out of favour and all his generalship and hopes of becoming an infernal prince up in smoke, which is a cleverer way of putting it than I realised when I started the sentence. As to why, it’s a bit of a mystery.’

Cabal could have explained the primary reason for Ratuth Slabuth’s fall from—and one uses the term advisedly—grace with great clarity, but it seemed a little like boasting, so he did not. Besides, if he was going to be making the new Satan’s reacquaintance shortly, he was sure Ratuth would be unlikely to have forgotten him and there would probably be some gloating.

*   *   *

The structure of Hell seemed to have changed somewhat in Cabal’s absence, but then he reminded himself—as he forced himself to do every few minutes—that this was not actually Hell exactly, the demons were not exactly demons, and the Ratuth Slabuth they would soon encounter was not exactly Ratuth Slabuth, former general of Hell, patronising snob, and proud tenant of the upper cantons of the enormous population spread across multiple realities, all of whom counted Johannes Cabal as an enemy.

In any case, his experiences of Hell’s physical organisation to date did not tally at all with the scenery through which they now travelled. Previously it had all been tunnels and chambers, lava outfalls, stalactites, and stalagmites. The open red desert beneath the light of a burning, curdled moon that could be no true satellite was all new to him, nor did he recall this particular manifestation in any of his reading. The gibbous, flaming moon in particular gave him some grounds for concern, an echo of events that sounded loud and insistent and that boded no good if his fears were in any wise grounded. Unable to do very much about it, he contented himself with pointedly ignoring it on the off chance it was possible in this place to ‘cut’ supernatural astronomical bodies, and thereby send them home in high dudgeon to sob their hearts out in a suitably vast boudoir.

The experiment didn’t seem to be working thus far, but that was little enough reason to give it up just yet. Or ever.

The plain littered with the ruins of former diabolical grandeur gave way to a slow rocky incline that abruptly gave way to reveal that they were on the edge of a vast shallow crater as if torn out by a large though insubstantial asteroid, perhaps made of marshmallow, the wreckage of which was subsequently devoured by many ants over an extended period. It could just as easily have been an ancient volcanic caldera, but that offered fewer possibilities for marshmallow-orientated simile.

In the centre of the crater—whatever its origin—the land rose again as a spike of dark rock. The three of them paused in their progress to look at that wondrous structure. Striking thousands of feet up from the base of the crater stood the needle worked at every point into colonnades and balconies, arches and embrasures, and an embarrassment of columns, with finials and plinths of all manner of design where columns might reasonably go and pilasters where they couldn’t.

‘That,’ said Miss Smith, ‘is the stupidest wedding cake I have ever seen.’

In the red-hued shadows cast by the burning moon and its lazy glow that licked across the vault of what passed for Hell’s sky, a city had gathered around the base of the needle, a humdrum ramshackle sort of place made from abrogated sins and cardboard boxes, corrugated iron and obsolescent dread.

‘Your new Satan’s building efforts seem very polarised,’ said Cabal. ‘Who lives in the needle? Where “live” is a very relative term.’

‘That’s ’is Infernal Majesty’s palace.’

‘All of it?’

The demon De’zeel nodded.

‘What has become of the princes?’ demanded Zarenyia. ‘Where are Asmodeus and his crowd? They can’t be living in those ruins we passed, can they?’

‘’Is ’Igh Sataness says pride is what put us down ’ere, so nobody gets nuffink wivout working for it. ’E gets the big ’ouse ’cos ’e worked ’ardest. Obvious, innit? He came up from the ranks, got busted down, came up again. So…’ The lizard pointed at the needle, so impressive in some ways, so utterly ludicrous in others.

‘Why all the columns?’ asked Miss Smith.

‘’E likes columns.’

*   *   *

’E did indeed. Cabal once more had the impression that this slippery realm that used the legend of Prester John as its shingle was trying to say something again, but he was not sure what it was. Perhaps it did not matter. It seemed to Cabal that, unappealing an idea that it was, he would perhaps be wisest not to treat these experiences as a puzzle box, or at least not quite yet. Surely, he thought, not all the pieces were yet in play, and what of Horst and Miss Barrow? Might they have made discoveries of their own? All the points of data—or at least a decent majority of them—were required before he might bring himself to profitably theorise. In the meantime …

‘Is that Leviathan?’ said Zarenyia suddenly.

What had at first appeared to be a municipal hall covered with broken-down cardboard packing boxes joined with wire was now revealed to be a huge creature under a blanket of broken-down cardboard packing boxes joined with wire. The entity’s vast cetaceous face looked mournfully down at them as they passed. By its front left flipper and hopelessly dwarfed by its bulk was a small sign, also written on rough brown cardboard. Please Help, it read. Unable to Work Due to a Persistent Medical Condition.

‘Don’t look at ’im!’ protested De’zeel when he noticed where their attention lay. ‘You’ll only encourage ’im.’

‘’E’s a mangledinker, in’t ’e, De’zeel?’ said De’eniroth, spending long seconds over each syllable and still getting them wrong.

‘A malingerer! Yus! That ’e is!’

Filled with righteous indignation, the demons marched (we must assume De’eniroth was marching, but really it was very hard to tell; certainly his many leg-like undulipodia assumed quite a martial rhythm in their movement) past the redundant Prince of Hell. Miss Smith looked back, and saw a tear sufficient to fill a pond run down Leviathan’s cheek.

‘They’re a cruel lot around here, aren’t they?’ she whispered to Cabal.

‘It is Hell. A reasonable facsimile of it, at least.’

She accepted the point, but added, ‘I wasn’t expecting it to be quite so petty. Something more grandiose. But they seem to be content to practise the little sins of neglect that we see every day on the streets of any metropolis.’

Cabal looked at her askance. ‘You expected better?’

‘Yes. It’s silly, but I was. Selfishness is the real root of all evil, but I thought we would see it grown here into extraordinary forms. Instead we have poverty and beggary while the powerful live up in the grand house and ignore it, as do their lickspittles. This is no more Hell than is London.’

‘Well…’ began Cabal, but the thought was lost as they arrived at the needle’s gatehouse.

*   *   *

The grand reception to the needle was situated within a huge blockhouse sufficient to contain the Royal Albert Hall, should it ever be stolen and require a place to hide it. Nor is ‘blockhouse’ an entirely undeserved description. Yes, it had columns—many columns—and buttresses and crenellations and all manner of other architectural details that most architects spend a lifetime keeping out of the same building at the same time for fear of causing some sort of aesthetic overload. Yes, it was grand and impressive. Yes, it was all of these things and yet it still felt very, very military in nature. It was a barracks for hordes of demons who—the expedition noted as De’eniroth and De’zeel greeted and were greeted in return—were of the same mind as their guides; that is, very little mind for anything at all but an easy life. These were the ranks of the easily persuaded, those of weathercock loyalties and a finger or other useful appendage kept permanently moistened for the speedy discovery of which way the wind blew.

It was hardly surprising that Hell had an embarrassment of such treacherous riches; it was, after all, a land of opportunities for the disloyal and inconstant, and reliable unreliability is a sort of constancy in itself. What was perhaps a little more surprising was that they had thrown over any number of other opportunities to turn their coats in favour of hitching the flickering lanterns of their fidelity to a minor player such as Ratuth Slabuth. Yes, he had once been one of Lucifer’s generals, but more by dint of his accountancy and organisational skills. As unlikely successions went, it was of an order with Attila the Hun being usurped by his tailor.

However he had managed to worm his way to the top of the pile, it was plain his was not a popular government. Lucifer had managed affairs using a sort of laissez-faire style that verged on not caring at all, enforced with occasional and terrible displays of merciless force against detractors and troublemakers. Lucifer had few rules and allowed Hell to more or less run itself, which, given how easily the minds of many of his subjects ran to chaos and turmoil, was possibly wise. If he had demonstrated any great genius for the position at all, it had been knowing the right demon for the right job, and in keeping the unaligned devils out of the main part of Hell so they might not sow resentment by the simple fact of their being.

It had been light-touch management carried to its extreme, but given that Hell’s basic function was to be beastly to the souls of the damned and given that being beastly was very much a default position for the majority of demons, it had worked well enough. Even Lucifer’s later adoption of cribbage and macramé to the horrors of the pit had worked surprisingly well. The truth of it was that an eternity of very much anything becomes torture after a while.

Ratuth Slabuth, in contrast, was the micro-manager from Hell in all senses. He had somehow engineered a coup (and probably done so using a lot of diagrams and a ream of graph paper) and rationalised the operations of Hell. It was probably far more efficient, but it was also hugely disruptive to creatures that enjoyed their own brands of huge disruption and didn’t care for Ratuth’s paginated, verified, and cross-checked version in the slightest. Hence the blockhouse.

Cabal had noted no other entrance visible in the cleared area around the needle’s base and this did not surprise him. The needle was obviously a military structure predicated primarily on defence, and castles do not usually have a preponderance of entrances. Ratuth Slabuth was plainly not a popular ruler, and revolution threatened his reign of error.

There was considerable surliness on the part of the guardian demon in the reception blockhouse, although this was as likely due to the presence of De’eniroth and De’zeel as anything else; it seemed they garnered little respect amongst their peers. That offhandedness vanished on the instant that De’zeel announced—with sufficient dropped aspirates to power a family of Cockneys for six months—that the lady with all the legs was none other than Mistress Zarenyia, Devil of the Outer Darkness and Casual Severer of Limbs.

As had been the case with De’eniroth and De’zeel, this was all that was required to turn demons that looked like huge tripedal rhinoceroses crossed with praying mantises, armoured in pitted iron and carrying swords the size of windmill sails, into oleaginous waiters on discovering a crown prince with generous tipping habits has taken a table in their section. Cabal and Miss Smith tried not to look too embarrassed by all the inexpert fawning going on. Zarenyia, however, was very much in her element.

‘Boys, boys, boys!’ she laughed, in this case a mild admonition rather than a declaration of her diet. ‘Don’t crowd a girl. Such rude boys. It may come to spankings if you carry on like this much longer.’

‘Sorry, miss,’ muttered the largest of the behemoths, somehow managing to blush through eighteen inches of armour plate. ‘We’re just really excited to see you.’

‘She gets that a lot,’ said Cabal, but no one was paying him any attention at all.

The behemoth was still talking. ‘Satan ordered your presence weeks ago, and will be very happy that you are here.’

‘Weeks ago? But, poppet, even I didn’t know I’d be here weeks ago.’

The behemoth frowned, causing some of its skull armour to bend such was the puissance of even its facial muscles. ‘No, Mistress Zarenyia, we are surprised to find you here. Satan sent search parties to the outer darkness.’

‘He did?’ Cabal noticed even Zarenyia’s natural ebullience faltered in the face of this intelligence. ‘That’s very … satanic of him. You must have lost a lot of demons doing that.’

The behemoth shrugged. It was like watching a hillock during a highly localised seismic event. ‘All of them. But you’re here now, so that doesn’t matter! Huzzah!’

Zarenyia cast an uncertain sideways glance at Cabal. ‘Yippee,’ she said.

*   *   *

As they progressed onward through the gatehouse and into the needle proper, so the entourage grew. Cabal was unsurprised to see that De’eniroth and De’zeel were now merely hangers-on, despite protesting their pivotal role in events to anyone who would listen, but no one would. He was more surprised and, it must be said, faintly insulted to discover that he was also very much on the edge of the spotlight. If he had been asked to explain why he, Johannes Cabal, necromancer, freelance sociopath, and lurker in the shadows, was so put out by the lack of attention being put his way, he would have laughed an abrupt, unconvincing laugh and said he was perfectly content not to be the centre of attention. It really would have been a terrifically unconvincing laugh, however, and the questioner would have to be a gullible muggins of the most credulous sort to accept it as anything but the dissembling of a peeved man. It was probably not envy nearly so much as a sense of a perturbation in the rightness of things. He, after all, was Johannes Cabal, and he had gone to pains to make himself unpopular in Hell, albeit as a side effect of other endeavours. Yet here was Zarenyia, a devil and therefore inimical to the hierarchies of Hell, being fawned over as if she were a successful young actress who had wandered into the Society of Roués.

His increasingly vile mood was not improved by the prospect of traipsing up the thousands of steps necessary to attain the tip of the needle, where Ratuth Slabuth no doubt maintained his throne room. That this burden was removed from him gave him no joy, however.

The very centre of the needle was hollow, an immensely deep shaft that started wide and narrowed in similarity to the angles of the outer wall. Running in a dizzying helix up the side of the shaft was exactly the staircase Cabal had anticipated and feared. He noted it did not seem to have a handrail, another of Hell’s grotesque Health & Safety failings. He did not savour the thought of climbing it in the slightest.

He decided to start with the rhetorical, thereby giving himself the opportunity to wax wrathful subsequently. After gaining the attention of the lead behemoth with some difficulty, he gestured up into the great spiral of stairs that wound up into the gloom above. ‘Do you honestly expect us to walk all the way up those steps?’ he demanded.

The behemoth looked at him as if he were an idiot, which, coming from something that looked not quite as intellectual as a side of beef in a helmet, felt understandably insulting.

‘No,’ it said, and the tone it took in no way alleviated the sense of insult. ‘You’ll fly.’

‘Fly?’ Now it was Cabal’s turn to treat his interlocutor as a dimwit. ‘Do I look like I have wings?’

‘No,’ agreed the behemoth, ‘but she does.’

‘She?’ was all Cabal had time to say before a pair of arms snaked around him beneath his armpits.

‘Relax, and let me take care of everything,’ whispered a female voice in his ear that bore distinct similarities of timbre to certain of Zarenyia’s utterances. Usually the ones just before she fed.

Abruptly, he was airborne. His startled yelp drew the attention of Zarenyia herself, whose face hardened immediately when she took in Cabal’s very tactile new friend.

‘Don’t you dare,’ she said, and her voice was cold enough to coalesce carbon dioxide snow from the air. Cabal thought for a strange moment she was talking to him, but then the voice by his ear said, ‘Don’t worry, Mistress Zarenyia. I shan’t break him.’ And so saying, Cabal found himself borne up into the sulphured atmosphere of the needle shaft.

‘That woman had wings,’ said Miss Smith, more to assure herself she was not delusional than as a useful statement of fact.

‘Succubus,’ said Zarenyia, her face thunderous. ‘I’ll give her “Shan’t break him”. Get aboard!’

‘Aboard?’ said Miss Smith, vainly looking about for a train, or a steamboat, or possibly a balloon. She was still looking when one of the devil’s forelimbs grasped her around the midriff and all but threw her onto Zarenyia’s back, where the great curved spiderlike abdomen joined the distinctly humanlike torso.

‘Hang on,’ said Zarenyia, and leapt to the nearby curve of the staircase. Miss Smith grunted at the impact, but barely had time to draw breath before Zarenyia set off in hot pursuit of the hapless necromancer.

She did not, however, charge up the staircase. Instead, she headed straight up the wall, the tips of the great armoured legs somehow adhering to a surface that was not merely sheer, but that angled in some degrees past the vertical. Miss Smith suddenly found herself in dire straits; angora is not the easiest material upon which to gain a grip and she was forced to find the bare skin of Zarenyia’s midriff.

‘What are you doing back there?’ said the devil, not censoriously.

Miss Smith could only make a startled squeal for an answer, for Zarenyia was now entirely inverted beneath the next turn of the staircase and Miss Smith’s grip slid further up. She was sure that if she didn’t fall to her doom, she would instead simply die of embarrassment. She prided herself on an outgoing sort of personality open to new experiences. Inadvertently touching up a spider-devil, however, was nowhere to be found on her to-do list.

‘I’m sorry!’ she managed to blurt as Zarenyia flipped around the staircase’s edge and brought them both the right way up once more. ‘I’m so very sorry! I didn’t mean…’

‘I know you didn’t, but it’s sweet of you to apologise. The fault is mine, though. I keep forgetting humans can’t just stick to things like a normal person. We need a different strategy if we’re to keep you safe.’ She looked about her on the level of the needle onto which they had emerged. ‘This way!’ she cried as if Miss Smith had any say in the matter, and set off at a canter towards a double door built into a shallow archway.

‘What’s through here?’ she gasped out, clinging on for second life and only soul.

Zarenyia’s canter broke into a gallop. ‘No idea. Let’s find out, shall we?’

The doors were as massive as anything else in that dizzying tower, a construction of such Brobdingnagian scale as to make Cyclopes suck their teeth and say it was a bit much for their taste. Yet the foot-thick wood shivered under the impact of single-minded devil legs and smashed open to allow the passage of Zarenyia and her dismayed passenger. Nor was she the only dismayed one there; they were in one of Hell’s many halls of records wherein sins were tabulated, tallied, assimilated, and, where applicable, marked with a gold star for a job well done. All the minor paper-shuffling was performed by a positive legion of administrative imps and several score were currently present, mainly engaged in throwing armfuls of carefully ordered documents into the air while scattering from the devil’s headlong passage, all while squealing in the time-honoured manner of the swine of Gadarene.

Zarenyia honoured their presence in as far as she halloed, ‘Stand clear! Make a hole! Get out of the way, you frightful little vermin!’ ahead of her, but she neither moderated her heading nor her speed by so much as a jot. Filing cabinets were flung aside, imps were accidentally speared on arachnoid legs, desks were overturned in the charge. The noise was cacophonous, the chaos wholesale.

Miss Smith realised that she was enjoying herself.

Even when she realised Zarenyia’s course was taking them directly towards a wide bay window that looked out across the shanty town outside, and the blood sand plain within, she was not affrighted. Instead she tightened her grip, narrowed her eyes, and trusted to her new and unusual companion.

For her part, Zarenyia slowed a little as her spinneret and hind legs got busy. Under her abdomen they delivered to her a length of twined silk—still sticky—and this Zarenyia took by the ends in her human hands and swung the centre up and over both their heads in the manner of a skipping rope. The silk caught Miss Smith in the small of the back, and then she was drawn close as Zarenyia pulled on it with a modicum of her inhuman strength. Once she was forcibly spooned against Zarenyia’s back, the devil quickly knotted it around her own waist.

‘There,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘That will keep you much safer. Feel free to hang on with your arms, though. I shan’t be troubled by it, truly. I don’t really have a concept of over-familiarity, you see.’

Miss Smith could see, and embraced Zarenyia tightly. Devil and witch grinned fiercely at one another.

‘That’s the spirit,’ said Zarenyia. ‘We’re having such fun together!’ And then she jumped out of the window.

The imps of Satan’s needle were long inured to odd noises; permanent residents of Hell get used to almost anything. There was, however, an unfamiliarity in the pace, magnitude, and variety of odd noises they were experiencing that day. The ones who happened to look from the windows stood the best chance of seeing exactly what was causing all the fuss.

Galloping up the side of the needle came a spider-devil of the succubine variety, laughing uproariously, and upon her back rode a woman in black wearing an ebon crown, joyfully whooping and using such profane language that the imps simply had nowhere to look. Up and up they raced, wrecking gargoyles* and smashing windows as they went. It was all probably accidental. Probably. Debris, laughter, and salty invectives were left in their wake, and the imps could only assume a hen party was in progress.

Finally, they attained the top of the needle, or very nearly the top in any case. It was clear that the needle’s tip was given over to a tall throne room with open verandas about it upon which Satan and his senior management could look down upon the lesser evils. These had banister rails upon them, the safety of those who frequented such elevated heights obviously deemed much more important than those beneath them in both social and physical terms.

Upon one such rail, a silken cord as thick as a man’s thumb yet strong enough to garrotte Mount Eiger suddenly wrapped and gripped. Upon the other end of the cord swung upwards and into view Zarenyia and Miss Smith, Zarenyia’s legs rapidly working as she drew the cord back to her. They swung up past the horizontal, and had attained the veranda before they had time to fall back. The cord detached, and they thundered into the presence of Satan with rather less than a ‘by your leave’.

They got there moments after Cabal, whom they discovered staggering around in a state of great agitation, his face grey, and dangerously close to hyperventilation. Zarenyia’s delight vanished at the sight of him. She snapped the cord binding Miss Smith to her in a single furious spasm.

‘Get down, darling,’ she said. ‘Things are going to get messy.’

‘We’ll take them all on.’ Miss Smith glowered at the shocked ranks of hellish aristocracy arrayed thereabouts.

‘A sweet thought, but I’m only interested in one presently. And she is mine.’

Cabal was walking in roughly their direction, but his legs were weak beneath him, and the line of his walk was desultory and wandering. He pointed back at the succubus who had carried him to the needle’s apex.

‘That … woman … took liberties. With … with…’ Cabal, for once, found himself unable to express his feelings. ‘All the way up the … up here … she touched … she did…’

‘Hush, hush, sweetness.’ Zarenyia had, in the many years of her existence, destroyed many lives, devoured many souls. She was sure she was inured to suffering, having been the author of so much of it herself. Yet from somewhere in her, the sweet tones she had so often employed as a weapon were here used softly and with sympathy and, for once, without simulation. ‘You don’t have to say anything. I know exactly what she did.’

For hadn’t she done much the same herself a thousand times?

She glared at the recalcitrant succubus, a creature of opulent form and licentious lines dressed in something that looked like she had made it herself from a borrowed spool of red satin ribbon, and returned the spool almost untouched. ‘I said—and I mark it quite clearly—don’t you dare. It seems you dared.’

The succubus smirked. It was a salacious smirk. ‘I said I wouldn’t break him. He’s still alive, isn’t he?’

Presently, the succubus sailed out into the brimstone sky, before arcing gracelessly (with a lot of limb thrashing and screaming due to a sudden lack of wings) downwards, and ploughing through the ceiling of a lean-to containing a dishevelled long-legged owl wearing a crown made from stained parchment. Stolas, formerly a Prince of Hell and commander of no less than twenty-six demoniacal legions, was not handling unemployment well. He watched the succubus groaning in the shallow crater she had made upon impact.

‘Ugh,’ said the succubus, rather less alluring for the moment.

‘I used to be somebody, you know,’ said Stolas. The succubus didn’t say anything to that so he prodded her a few times with a talon until she groaned again. Accepting this as sufficient to count as a dialogue, he continued, ‘I don’t get many visitors.’

*   *   *

Zarenyia flung the succubus’s wings, torn out by the roots, over the balcony edge and watched them flutter down into the shadowed mass of the shantytown. ‘Frightful rudeness,’ she said, turned in a clatter of chitinous footfalls, and clicked her way indoors.

In the midst of the great council of Satan rose a throne, albeit a sensibly sized one, with a small table by it and, in the opposite arm, what appeared to be a horizontal loop of stone in which a goblet sat. The throne’s occupant took up the goblet, took a sip or two while it considered these new persons, and then returned the goblet to the loop where, sensibly, it couldn’t be knocked over. This was a very sensible sort of Satan.

‘I feel reasonably sure I know to whom I speak,’ he said, for his voice was that of a male, even if his body was a mass of strange angled bones and struts that both gave a topological hint of terrible ontological truths that would shred the intellect from any who might try to broach them whilst also resembling homemade Christmas decorative chain made by folding and plaiting paper until one forgets where one is up to and accidentally creates a topological hint of terrible ontological truths that would shred the intellect from any who might try to broach them, much as happened with Aunt Julie.* This non-Euclidean (of course it was non-Euclidean) mass was topped with a horse’s skull, and the skull wore a helmet of Greco-Roman design and splendid aspect, all gold and silver with a crest of horsehair that swayed so beautifully with every movement of the skull beneath it that psychic impressions of it might settle into the dreams of advertising copywriters and inspire the most extravagant claims for shampoos.

This was Ratuth Slabuth.

‘Reasonably sure, but I should ask. May I know who you three are?’

Zarenyia was still in a mood and not prepared to take nonsense from anyone, least of all a horse’s skull perched upon a mathematical conundrum. ‘You know full well, Slabuth, but if you insist. I am Zarenyia, devil of the shadowed tunnels, succubine of the first name of the Blinded Dodecateuch, corruptor of passions, eater of souls, and really rather put out by your poor minion control.’

Before Ratuth Slabuth could say anything, Miss Smith—still all awash with endorphins both from her heady ride up the needle as well as proximity to Zarenyia and the intoxicating effect such intimacy with a succubine tended to have upon humans—said in a loud and penetrating voice, ‘I am the Witch Queen of the Necropolis!’ She looked around with satisfaction at the gawping sea of demoniacal faces ranged upon her. ‘You fuckers,’ she concluded, still smiling.

‘I see,’ said Ratuth Slabuth. He made a note in a book and placed it on the occasional table by his throne. He looked at Johannes Cabal. ‘And you, sir?’

Cabal had been half bent over, still racked with the assorted shocks his rapid ascent had provided him. At Ratuth Slabuth’s words, however, he froze for several seconds, then slowly stood straight, bringing his gaze to bear upon his interrogator.

‘You…’ Words again failed him for a time, but he rallied, focussed, drew breath, and tried again. ‘You … jest.’

The horse skull gazed at him, perhaps even through him. ‘I do? How odd. I am not generally known for my jocularity. But the nature of whatever it is that you think amusing is unclear to me, so I shall ask again; who are you?’

Cabal glared back, the recent indignities visited upon his person momentarily forgotten in the face of this new one visited upon his pride. He knew this was not the real Ratuth Slabuth, but felt impelled to answer it as if it were. Rationally, he reassured himself that this was necessary to permit them to work their way through whatever challenges this place might impose. Heavens forfend he have any emotional reasons.

‘How quickly they forget.’ Cabal said it as if to himself, and larded it with a surfeit of nuance. ‘You really don’t remember me, Corporal Ragtag Slyboots?’

There was a sharp intake of breath from the watching horde, which expressed amongst the bone demons as mournful toots as if upon ocarinas.

‘Ragtag Sly … Slyboots?’ The new Satan looked down upon the dishevelled human with astonishment. Then he astonished the dishevelled human by laughing. It wasn’t even the classical ‘Nyahahahaha!’ laugh beloved of those who are about to dump their unloved interlocutors into an acid tank, or shoot them, or kick them off a convenient cliff. It was—apparently—the honest laughter of a jolly uncle on being caught in some harmless practical joke sprung by his infant niece. ‘Hohohohohoho!’ he went, thereby upsetting Cabal, who had rather been hoping for the ‘Nyahahahaha!’ variety as proof that the barb had struck home.

‘I haven’t been called Ragtag Slyboots in some time,’ said Ratuth Slabuth, wiping figurative tears of mirth from his vacant eye sockets. When his mirth had subsided (accompanied by the plaintive toots of bone demons letting their breaths out), he continued. ‘Ah, Cabal, isn’t it? Yes, I remember you. All that business with the Carnival of Discord? That was you, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ said Johannes Cabal, a necromancer of very little infamy indeed, it seemed. ‘That was me. You were a general, and then Lucifer reduced you to the ranks, because of me. Because of me.’

The reaction when it came was not quite the one anticipated.

‘Mr Cabal,’ said Satan, ‘thank you so very much. I owe everything to you.’

Cabal’s vocabulary clattered to an empty halt. ‘Eh?’

‘Let me tell you how it happened.’ Ratuth rose grandly from his throne and for one profoundly awful moment, Cabal thought he was going to sing.

‘When Lucifer hied himself off to wherever it was he hied himself off to,’ said Ratuth, ‘as you might imagine, things became rather fraught in his absence. All the Princes and, indeed, the Princesses of Hell—as an aside, does anyone know why the princesses are called princes, too? No? I don’t suppose it matters really—were instantly forming little alliances and backstabbing one another, and doing the sorts of things demon lords and ladies are supposed to do. Have you ever noticed that such things are ultimately unhelpful for society as a whole? All that energy and resources expended in internecine squabbling. Silly, isn’t it? One would think entities of great antiquity would pick up a few ideas about common cause and cooperation, but no. Conspiracies and backstabbing, backstabbing and conspiracies. All of which they predicted, counter-plotted against, which was taken into account, spawning counter-counterplans, ridiculously complex matryoshkas of concentric schemes, all constructed to conceal the innermost goals that were so compromised by that point that they had the overall effect of tying shoelaces together. Mountains of effort for molehills of effect. Laughable.

‘So I simply left them to it. As you so correctly point out, I was a mere nothing, a spear-carrier. Why would they concern themselves with me? Asmodeus, Mephistopheles, all my former colleagues, my brother generals, my lords and ladies … suddenly I was of no more worth than one of the flies buzzing around Beelzebub’s arse.

‘And that was perfect.’

‘Even a Prince of Hell has only so much time, so much energy to expend, and they burnt it all in a magnificent bonfire of their vanity. Demons, you will understand, have a great deal of vanity; it was a conflagration. And when it was all over, they had employed every trick, squandered every favour, cast away every precious asset, and every back was heavy with knives. That was all. Otherwise, things were much the same. Pointless.

‘This is Hell’s trouble in a nutshell. Everyone is so busy being evil, they forget to get anything done. Not me; while the princes and the dukes and all the rest of them were wasting their time, I was putting together my own little army. It didn’t have to be large, and it wasn’t. All it had to be was coherent, disciplined, and determined.’

Ratuth Slabuth gestured out towards the horizon, dark as clotted blood. ‘This is what I wrought. I found the high and mighty resting after their exertions, and I cast them down. Again. One would think after being kicked out of Heaven, they would take steps to ensure some degree of job security, but I can only assume that they were under the impression that they could fall no further.

‘I proved them wrong. I threw them out of their palaces, dissolved what was left of their legions, cast them into the gutter, and I have taken precautions to ensure that they never rise from it again. They made mistakes, and Hell is not a very forgiving place.’

Cabal was in an argumentative humour. ‘But you yourself rose from the ranks twice. Isn’t it a flagrant hypocrisy to deny the same opportunity to others?’

Ratuth Slabuth looked at him quizzically. ‘You do realise that I’m Satan, don’t you? Hypocrisy really is part of the job.’

To this Cabal had no answer, and he fell into a truculent silence.

‘So, you’re not cross with dear Johannes, then?’ asked Zarenyia.

‘My dear lady, he is my unwitting benefactor. Of course I was angry at the time, but things worked out so splendidly, how could I possibly remain so? All’s well that ends well, after all. I am Satan, my position is unassailable and will remain so because I will not take my eyes from any potential enemies.’

‘You should thank me, then.’ Cabal was still in combative mood.

‘I think the operative word in my previous utterances was “unwitting”, Johannes, old stick. One cannot be thanked for causing an accident, no matter how beneficial that accident later turns out to be. No, I think my gratitude will be confined to simply not having you thrown into a sulphur pit for all eternity. That’s quite nice of me under the circumstances, isn’t it?’

Cabal found himself suddenly nostalgic for Lucifer.

Ratuth Slabuth continued, ‘Now, a small matter of bureaucracy. The demons of Hell all belong to a well-defined and rigid hierarchy. I have recently had to redefine it for reasons that must be obvious…’ He produced from the impossible angles of his body a green folder bound in black ribbon. ‘I have diagrams here, if anyone is interested? No? Well, in any case, the term “devil” is applied to those infernal entities that are not subordinate to this system. Being at the top myself, I am therefore the only resident of Hell that may call myself “devil”, a distinction that gives rise to the popular if technically inaccurate term “The Devil”.’ His equine skull somehow managed to smile at all those there present, even managing the nuances required to make it plain that it was an insincere, managerial sort of smile.

‘It complicates matters, however’—the skull turned to regard Zarenyia—‘when an unaligned devil without a portfolio wanders from the outer darkness into Hell proper. Rather makes a mess of the nomenclature.’

‘Lawks,’ said Zarenyia. ‘How inconvenient. Poor nomenclature.’ She bent her neck towards Cabal and whispered sotto voce, ‘What’s a nomenclature?’

‘Therefore some sort of accommodation must be reached, and a note made for any such future situations. Can you believe that the previous administration simply skated over matters such as these? Lucifer trusted to laissez-faire decisions and unregulated improvisations, if you can credit such a thing.’

‘Gosh,’ said Cabal innocently, ‘he really was evil.’

‘Well, quite,’ agreed the new Satan. ‘But it’s one thing to spread venality, corruption, and despair in the mortal realm, quite another to have shoddy bookkeeping in one’s own domain. Whatever was he thinking?’ He sighed. ‘In any event, we must normalise Mistress Zarenyia’s classification while she is within the borders of Hell proper. If you would follow me, madam?’

And, so saying, Satan sloped off like a mid-level functionary, a somewhat bemused Zarenyia following along. Cabal and Miss Smith were left alone with a lot of seemingly embarrassed demons.

‘Is he like this all the time?’ Cabal demanded of them. There was no vocalised reply, but a few surreptitious nods gave the answer all the same. Cabal spread his hands to his audience in supplication. ‘I am so sorry. This was impossible to foresee.’ The demons nodded ruefully.

*   *   *

‘So what’s this about really, darling?’ Ratuth Slabuth and Zarenyia had retired to a side room of modest dimensions, being only mildly gargantuan in scale. Beneath a gleaming dome of stone, within the marbling of which the faces of the damned seemed to writhe, Satan settled himself into one of his comfy thrones with the throw cushions, and Zarenyia settled herself upon a bed of leather pillows, lovingly wrought from the skins of used-car salesmen. ‘I have wandered the highways and avenues of Hell on many occasions without halt or hindrance. I find it hard to believe you really wish me and those like to carry passports in future.’

‘You are very perceptive, Mistress Zarenyia.’ He settled his sharp angles more comfortably into his throne, making some of its more sensate members emit muffled screams. ‘You are quite right, of course. I have brought you here by means of a small ruse. Naturally, there are no concerns regarding your status here; I long since devised a deviltry clause, right from the first of my hierarchical analysis green papers. I mean, really. What sort of Satan wouldn’t?’ He smirked bonily. ‘Apart from my predecessor, obviously. No, no. I wanted to take you aside for another matter entirely.’

Given her nature, Zarenyia wondered if Satan was proposing what she thought he might be proposing. It quickly became apparent that, no, he wasn’t. She felt an uncharacteristic degree of relief at this. She didn’t care much for Ratuth Slabuth’s personality, and his physical form presented a few challenges, too.

‘The thing is, Hell is large and complicated. Then there’s the whole business with the mortal world. One thing I have learned in my sojourn thus far, much to my chagrin, is that one has to delegate. I envy the other chap his omnipresence, omnipotence, omni-this, and omni-that. It would make the administration all so very much easier. Alas, it is all too much for my humble self.’ He seemed to be one of those entities that took great pride in his humbleness.

‘You have a small army of arse-kissers out there,’ said Zarenyia sweetly. ‘Form a cabinet.’

‘Oh, nothing would be easier,’ said Ratuth Slabuth, but without enthusiasm. ‘We are never short of sycophants in Hell. Competence, however, is a rarer commodity. The princes, for all their self-regard, were a necessary part of the apparatus of damnation. I brought them low because they presented a threat to the long-term stability of the realm and of my new regime. Their ability was never in question.’

Zarenyia realised with a small shock where this was going, but said nothing, expressed nothing. She had not survived as long as she had by being naive, no matter how she might behave.

‘I need new princes,’ said Satan slowly, regarding her through narrowed eye sockets. ‘New princesses.’

‘That you can trust?’

His laugh was sudden and, by his lights, honest. ‘Good heavens far, far above, no! Trust is as rare as a devil’s tears here. I don’t expect it, nor set much store by those who profess it. No, common interest is a far more reliable bond. For example, I am thinking my first appointee should be primarily concerned with the mortal realm. I would need someone whose curriculum vitæ involves a great deal of interaction with humans, somebody who can pass amongst them undetected, sowing sin in his … or her … or possibly its wake. I need a personable demon. A people demon.’

There seemed little point in pretending she didn’t know what he was getting at, so she said, ‘You are fond of operative words, Satan. I think the one there is demon. I am a devil.’

‘Through choice?’

‘Yes.’

‘I can understand and respect that, but the fealty of a Princess of Hell weighs far less heavily than that of a common lemure. You would be a free agent for most of your time. The occasional conclave to decide this or that, but otherwise footloose and fancy-free to do as thou wilt. Common purpose, you see? Your natural inclinations lie in the same direction as my needs for a new and senior demon.’

Zarenyia rose from the pillows and walked up and down before the throne, hands behind her back, ruminating on Satan’s words. ‘You’re tempting me,’ she said at last.

Ratuth Slabuth shrugged, the angles of his form rattling at the gesture. ‘Again, rather part of my job. Just think of it, my dear: no hiding in the outer darkness any longer; all the souls you can eat, just providing rather more actually reach Hell; and you shall never have to be summoned to manifest again, as the ability to do so at will is a gift of the position. Oh, and of course a palace constructed to your design and furnished to your every whim. Really, what else can I offer you? Doesn’t every girl want to be a princess?’

Zarenyia did not answer, but only continued to pace back and forth. Not so long before, she might have told this new Satan, thank you, but no. She liked the outer darkness. She liked being her own creature. She liked being a devil.

Now she realised things had changed, and it was Johannes Cabal that changed them. He had needed somebody with her very specific skills and asked her along for an adventure. A real, actual adventure, and it had changed her. When it was all over and they had said their goodbyes, she had found the shadows and darkness of Hell’s borderlands no longer inviting, but only dull. She had hung in her web and reminisced, reliving events over and over. The cobwebs blew gently in the sulphur-heavy air there around her, and she watched them with something new gnawing at her: ennui. There in the endless twilight she waited and waited for the slight spiritual tug that told her that she was being summoned back to the mortal world. She waited and waited, and she waited in vain. If not Cabal, then somebody. Just somebody. She wouldn’t even devour them, not necessarily. Perhaps they could go on an adventure, she and this faceless, putative mortal, who always seems to wear a black suit and speak with a German accent. She had been delirious with joy when the summons finally came, although she had taken pains to conceal the extent of her pleasure on arrival. Really, darling—a girl has to maintain some mystique.

‘May I ask how long this offer is open?’ she said.

‘How long?’ He seemed surprised. ‘You’re still not convinced?’

‘It’s a splendid one, and don’t think for a moment that I am not terribly tempted. Merely that I’m a tiny bit busy at present. On an adventure and everything, you see.’ She didn’t feel it necessary to add that Ratuth himself was nothing but a facsimile of the real thing, as were all the demons, as was this ‘Hell’, and that any offer made here was therefore moot, to put it mildly. It seemed rude to bring something like that up.

‘Ah, yes. Cabal’s little fool’s errand.’

‘Oh, you know about that, do you?’ Zarenyia thought it very metaphysical of a fictitious rendering of a real entity to be aware of the circumstances that had brought it about, and therefore unattractive.

I do hope he isn’t going to break the fourth wall, she thought, or at least, generated inhuman cerebral processes that equate to a human mind thinking words much like that. If the dreadful oik starts whinging on about how ghastly it is to be fictional, I may very well scream.

‘The Fountain of Youth? Yes, of course. You wouldn’t be aware of it of course, but every time some mortal or another invokes the Five Ways, it impinges on Hell, often at a very inconvenient time. Happily on this occasion, it brought you to me. Who says nice things don’t happen to embodiments of elemental evil?’

‘I’m sorry, sweetheart, I fear that we may be talking at cross purposes. I have no idea what this “Five Ways” of yours is. Johannes has got himself a little book. I forget the name—somebody’s diary, I think—but I am sure it isn’t called Five Ways.’

‘Oh, my dear lady, no. We are talking entirely of the same thing or, strictly speaking, things. The Five Ways is a whim of my predecessor. It exists in different times and places, and goes by different names and appearances, but it always promises much. Nor does it lie.’

Zarenyia wondered how she might delicately raise the business of Ratuth Slabuth being a temporary copy of the real thing, and was struggling to find a way. Then she remembered that she was a devil and therefore permitted to behave very badly when circumstances called for it. This was a dispensation she greatly valued; it had made her feel quite good about herself during mass murders and when leaving dinner parties early, the latter usually because she had murdered everyone there. It was good to be a devil.

‘The thing is, darling—and pardon my bluntness—but Johannes’s little magic book seems to create false versions of aspects of the world and its abutting worlds, just long enough to make their point. I wouldn’t raise the matter except you seem to be quite keen to do so yourself. The meat of it is that we are here because of the book, therefore, the inescapable conclusion is…’ She shrugged, spreading her hands apologetically. That didn’t seem quite enough considering she’d just implied that Satan was a storybook character to his face, so she raised her spiderish forelegs and make an apologetic gesture with those, too.

Ratuth Slabuth confounded all that by laughing. ‘Oh, now I begin to understand your wariness. You believe me to be just part of the fiction of the Five Ways. No. Hell is the birthplace of the Five Ways, and represents one of its trials.’

Zarenyia’s eyes widened. ‘So, you’re saying—’

‘Yes. But don’t trust to my word. To be frank, you would be foolish to. Use your senses. Reach out and taste this world, this Hell.’

Zarenyia gave Ratuth Slabuth a wryly suspicious eye, but did as he suggested. Creatures of the under- and overworlds have certain senses denied to mere mortals for the simple reason that mere mortals would never need them and, should they ever develop them, madness would shortly overwhelm them as they became aware of the superficiality of mundane existence, the great depths that undermine it, and the great heights that overarch it. Zarenyia reached out and found threads of happenstance and need, the weave of interactivities, the fabric of reality. She could smell that it ran threadbare out in the desert behind her towards the end of the endless cemetery, but here it flowed as it did anywhere, uneven as a web woven by a drunken spider.

‘Ah,’ said Zarenyia. ‘Unless my senses deceive me, this really is Hell.’

‘Just so,’ said Ratuth Slabuth with monumental complacency.

‘Lucifer has truly abdicated his role as Satan?’

‘I believe I said as much, yes.’

‘And you’re the new Satan with all Lucifer’s powers devolved to you?’

‘I would term it “unto you” as a more elegant phrasing, but yes.’

Zarenyia was feeling uncharacteristically overwhelmed. ‘The offer is real.’

‘A Princess of Hell. Indeed. I am entirely in earnest.’

Zarenyia, needing time to absorb that the offer—breathtaking enough even when she hadn’t believed this reality—was genuine, changed the subject, albeit to one in which she was keenly interested. ‘This Five Ways, what exactly is it?’

‘Just one of Lucifer’s whims, and let me tell you, there’ll be far fewer of those sorts of shenanigans henceforth. Focus on core business, that’s the ticket.’

‘If Lucifer devised it, then why does it follow through on its promises?’

‘Because no one really wants what they think they do. Briefly, the Five Ways manifests in different ways depending upon the culture it broaches. It always offers the moon, however; sometimes literally. It will draw in five individuals, and they will be challenged in five ways, hence the nervously brilliant name of the thing. At the end of it, assuming they haven’t died or been driven mad or just become distracted along the way, they will receive their hearts’ desire. These boons will, naturally, destroy them, as is the way with achieved ultimate goals.’ Ratuth Slabuth fluttered a tangent dismissively. ‘I’m convinced he was just at a loose end when he came up with it. Seems like make-work, doesn’t it?’

Zarenyia was totting up names in her head: herself, Miss Barrow, Miss Smith, and the brothers Cabal. Five.

‘Oh, bother,’ she said. ‘I like to think of myself as quite the wily one, but I appear to have gone galumphing into a trap like an utter ingénue. It’s quite damaging to the old self-image, I must say.’

‘Hardly a trap, dear lady. You can walk out of it at any time, and now you know what it is, you have no reason not to.’

‘No. I suppose not.’ She turned her attention to Satan. ‘In which case, to business. A princess, you say?’

‘Princess, palace, and power. All yours for the asking.’

‘Well, then. I suppose, allowing for the usual caveats about how if the deal isn’t what it appears to be, I reserve the right to get violently cross about it, I accept. I just need to get Johannes and Miss Smith along the way, and then you shall have my full attention.’

‘Ah, yes.’ Satan settled himself more comfortably upon his throne. ‘In Miss Smith I have no interest. She may return to her precious necropolis in the Dreamlands with my blessings, for whatever they are worth. Very little, I would guess.’ He coughed slightly, an affected noise that rattled his vertices. ‘Johannes Cabal is, however, a different matter. He will have to be dealt with.’

Zarenyia showed no emotion, but she felt it. ‘You gave the impression that all was forgiven and forgotten, viz. Johannes.’

‘Yes, I did. Those were lies. Fathering them is expected of me these days. Be assured, Mistress Zarenyia, I am in no wise done with that necromancer. He was the author of my humiliation, he conspired against me and brought me low simply for doing my job.’

‘Which was…?’

‘Trying to engineer his destruction. He is a very awkward and recalcitrant man, you know? But I was never anything but professional in my dealings with him.’ Ratuth Slabuth … Satan rose from his throne, and the awful geometry of his form unfolded until he towered, massive and emanating malevolence. ‘But he humiliated me, made me look a fool in front of Lucifer, and that was all that was required.’

Zarenyia weighed this, and thought it sounded like grapes of the sourest vine. ‘You mentioned something about sulphur pits, earlier…’

‘Molten sulphur, yes. But, no. Entirely insufficient. I have much better torments lined up for him.’

Zarenyia sighed. ‘Darling, I think I’ve been involved in enough innuendo-laden conversations to know where this is going, but I shall have to disappoint you. I cannot destroy him for you.’

‘Eh?’ said Satan.

‘I have given my bond not to harm him nor any of his merry crew.’ She neglected to explain that this did not technically extend to the late addition of Miss Smith, but she liked the necromantrix and did not care to give Ratuth Slabuth any options there. Nor did she feel the need to clarify that the giving of her bond had involved saying ‘dib’ a lot.

To her concealed dismay, he seemed to take this philosophically. ‘Of course. I anticipated something of the sort. Why else would he travel with a whimsically inclined killer? So, he trusts you?’

‘Yes. I think so.’ Another lie of omission; she was fairly sure she trusted him, too; an unusual sensation for a devil.

‘Excellent!’ He rubbed together a couple of extruded extremities that he used for handling things. ‘Then that is all that is necessary. You will not harm him—a bond is unbreakable, after all—but you shall be vital to his downfall. The passion of Johannes Cabal shall begin with his betrayal…’ He regarded Zarenyia through empty sockets darker than the most corrupt thought, and the bone of the skull creaked as he smirked. ‘Princess Zarenyia of the Ninth Circle.’

*   *   *

It was enough to turn a girl’s head. Power, privilege, and as many murders as she cared to commit, which was quite a few. It might pall eventually—things usually do—but she would have a glorious few millennia reaching such a state.

And yet she found herself testing the Hell around her at first from a sense of disbelief and then as a reflex. It passed every sniff and touch she gave it, psychically and otherwise, but she knew it would. Rationally, she was as positive as she had ever been about anything that this was truly Hell, and that Ratuth Slabuth’s promise to her was his bond. All she had to do was betray Johannes Cabal.

She knew she wouldn’t be hurting him directly; her own promises to him precluded that. Not hurting him physically, at least. Thinking back, she had failed to extend her bond to cover allowing him to come to harm by the hands, claws, and writhing thorned tentacles of others or any other such bit of petty weaselry. It had never occurred to her to do so at the time. After all, she was a solitary creature, spending decades at a time in the web-shrouded caverns of the outer darkness. She knew no one to connive with, no fellow devil with whom to conspire.

Then along came Johannes Cabal, and there had been fun and murders galore. The best time she’d had in … well, forever. And then he’d gone again, and she was by herself once more in the long silence. Not even a postcard. Funny how he only got in touch when he wanted something. Typical man. Typical human.

It would be a small betrayal, really. She would simply lead him up the garden path as she had with so many of his species, and then leave him there to dry. Alone and undefended while Ratuth Slabuth did whatever it was he planned to do. She hadn’t asked. She had no desire to know. There would be a brief unpleasantness for Cabal that would last no longer than eternity, and she meantime would be Princess Zarenyia. It was sad, but you can’t make an omelette without damning a few souls to everlasting torment. It was a fact of life.

Yes, existence was full of hard decisions that would sting for a while, but one just had to think in the long term. The very, very long term. She stiffened her resolve. A brief moment of pain, and then everything would be all right.

*   *   *

‘Hello, darlings!’ said Zarenyia as she breezed back into Satan’s throne room, a shambling, scuttling sound in her wake assuring her that Ratuth Slabuth was following. ‘Forms signed, bona fides authenticated. You will be delighted to hear that I am now declared a legal visitor to the scenic heart of Hell. Hooray for me!’

‘Finally.’ Cabal looked up sourly from the table where he, Miss Smith, and the demons De’eniroth and De’zeel were engaged in a game of cards under the eyes, antennae, and other sensory organs of the hellish horde there gathered. He flung down his hand of cards and rose, removing his jacket from the back of his chair as he did so. ‘I lost interest in this ridiculous game somewhere during the initial deal.’

There was another of those idiosyncratic sharp intakes of breath from the audience of demons; they took their cribbage very seriously.

‘His Lord Satan here’—Zarenyia carelessly jerked her thumb over her shoulder in Ratuth Slabuth’s direction—‘has been an absolute doll. I believe we now know where we should be going to next.’

Miss Smith unfurled a jet-black parasol and placed it upon her shoulder to ward off the rays of a non-existent sun. ‘Excellent. We should be moving on, really.’ She nodded politely. ‘Thanks, Satan. Lovely Hell you have here, but time is pressing, I should think.’

‘And where precisely is it that Ragtag Slyboots here thinks we should be going?’ said Cabal, having apparently lost at the card table any vague sense of diplomacy he may once have enjoyed.

‘Still trying to bait me, eh, Cabal?’ said Satan, and chuckled. ‘I really don’t have the luxury to indulge in such pettiness these days, I am afraid. I wish I could indulge you, but simply too busy. You understand, I’m sure?’

‘Not really,’ said Cabal. ‘You being in charge of Hell is tantamount to a second undermanager at a Pompeiian olive orchard being given responsibility for the Roman Empire. You are a small sort of demon, Ragtag. You were over-promoted once and it didn’t end well. I don’t see it going swimmingly for you or your charges this time, either.’

‘We shall see, shall we?’ said Ratuth Slabuth, and chuckled again. He gave the air of being very pleased with himself. ‘But I haven’t answered your question. In the centre of the Ninth Circle, below the now disused throne of the old Satan (I really can’t be bothered with all that lava and so forth, and as for a basalt throne, whatever was he thinking of? Terribly uncomfortable, believe you me), there is a tunnel that leads down to his original stronghold, the Ivory Citadel. It is a place secreted away and forgotten by almost all. There, all and every destined time and inevitable place may be reached. There, Fate itself awaits.’

‘That sounds like a powerful sort of location,’ said Cabal, his suspicion evident. ‘Very useful in a variety of ways, I would think. Why, then, is it secreted away and forgotten?’

This time Satan did not chuckle, but the jaw of the horse’s skull he used for a head curved into a deeply satisfied smile. ‘Because who truly wishes to confront their fate, of course?’

*   *   *

When Johannes Cabal had undertaken to find the truth at the heart of The One True Account of Presbyter Johannes by His Own Hand, he had at no point imagined that it would involve leading a procession of demons through the ruins of the Ninth Circle to the great shattered edifice that had once been the palace of Lucifer, before he decided to resign and seek opportunities elsewhere. Yet here he was, striding alongside the shambling disgrace of planar geometry Ratuth Slabuth that—in the real Hell—would be a resolute foe, accompanied by Zarenyia the succubine spider-devil and the dead and dismantled (yet looking very good on it, considering) Miss Smith the necromantrix. In their wake walked, shuffled, and oozed a horde of demons, who seemed to be along out of curiosity as much as representing any sort of court for the second Satan.

The former throne room was a very different place than Cabal remembered it. Then it had been heated and underlit by a vast pool of lava, the throne of Satan rising massively in the centre of a peninsula thrust out into the deadly lake. Without an army of imps equipped with pokers, however, the lava’s surface had been permitted to cool and was now a ruffled field of grey stone, liquid caught and frozen forever in flows and wavelets.

Cabal considered the physical organisation of Hell as he understood it, and now saw the significance of this place. It had begun to dawn upon him how he had misinterpreted the geography of Hell as they approached Lucifer’s palace and he could see that it rose up limitlessly above the surrounding plains until it was lost from sight in the crimson gloom. When he had come here on previous occasions, he had descended directly through the rings via the palace itself—a spindle in the midst of endless open spaces, its base here in the Ninth Circle, its zenith forming the gatehouse to Hell in the middle of the Desert of Limbo.

It seemed that perhaps not even the Ninth Circle was truly the palace’s foundation; if what Ratuth Slabuth had told Zarenyia was true, then below it was a place that extended the spindle’s ability to touch every circle of Hell out into all else. To Cabal’s mind there was a rightness about this. So much in the occult followed “as above, so below”, then here, of all places, should contain the archetype of the principle.

‘This way!’ said Ratuth Slabuth, leading the conga of the damned across the isthmus towards the empty throne. He seemed to be enjoying himself. ‘Almost there!’

They followed him counterclockwise around the great stump of the basalt throne, massive and inspiring of awe even when vacated. Even Cabal felt his spirits depressed in its presence. The last time he had seen it, it was occupied, and the occupant had not been friendly. Some ghost of that animosity hung around and coloured his thoughts a morose shade of dark blue stabbed through with arterial red.

He was not displeased that Ratuth Slabuth did not pause to offer a guided tour, but instead brought them smartly to a broad crevasse some ten yards wide at the rear of the throne’s base. The crevasse gave out into a rough tunnel and, from somewhere out of sight beyond the twists in the path, a milky glow dimly emanated. Though the lava had long since solidified, there was still a steady warmth emanating from the frozen lake. Despite this, the breeze that blew up from the place beneath was chilly and, in some way Cabal could not quantify, disturbing. It smelled of bad decisions and unforeseen eventualities. He did not care for it at all.

‘This is it, then?’ he asked of Ratuth Slabuth, or Satan.

‘It is, indeed, yes.’ Satan seemed enormously pleased with the outing. Cabal half expected him to reach into some intra-dimensional space in his ribs and produce a picnic hamper.

Cabal looked down into the tunnel. ‘The Ivory Citadel is just down there?’

‘It is, yes. Your fate awaits you, Johannes. I do so hope that you enjoy it.’

Cabal did not truly understand how it was that he finally understood, but there was a pressing certainty that had grown so heavily upon him as they had made their way there, it rendered him soul-weary and saddened.

‘It isn’t really the next step in our journey at all, is it?’

‘Ah, now, then.’ Satan looked up at the roughly hewn vault of the great audience chamber as he weighed his words. ‘Yes, and no. It’s not exactly what you wanted, but it’s certainly the next step. Indeed, it is the last step.’ He shook his head in a slow mockery of sadness. ‘Alas.’

‘The Ivory Citadel doesn’t exist.’ Cabal looked at the horde of demons arranged in a loose arc around them, hedging them in and preventing any easy escape. At ground level, at least, but if one’s party included somebody who was very good at running up walls …

He slid a glance at Zarenyia to prime her to be ready to act. She, however, was looking the other way. His glance turned into more of a glare, but still she seemed to be finding all sorts of things interesting with the sole exception of the imminent emergency at hand. Cabal would like to have hissed or gently side-kicked one her legs to draw her attention, but there was Satan, beaming at him with awful unctuousness.

‘Doesn’t exist? Of course it exists!’ Satan laughed at the wonderful joke he was playing. ‘I was entirely honest about it … up to a point. The point being that the citadel leads anywhere. Rather, it specifically leads nowhere. There is nothing within those pale walls but the final death, the utter extinction, the snuffing out of every vital essence.’

Cabal swallowed. ‘The final death is a myth. Something always survives. Even when Madam Zarenyia here devours a soul, there are leavings.’ He looked urgently at her, hoping that by mentioning her name he would finally attract her attention. But no, she was still finding her sudden interest in diabolical vulcanology supremely absorbing. With a growing sense that he had been handily outmanoeuvred, he plunged on. ‘There is always something left. The soul is a very resilient thing.’

‘So it is, it takes a great deal to destroy every last little peck of one. And, guess what, Johannes? The Ivory Citadel is just the place to make it happen.’

‘You’re going to kill us? Just like that?’ Miss Smith was understandably upset at the revelation. ‘I’m not even properly alive and you’re going to kill me?’

Satan seesawed his head from side to side while he considered. ‘Your destruction isn’t vital, but really, my dear, you are such an aberration. I cannot help but think that the cosmos would be a tidier place without you. So, yes. You’re going to die. Permanently. Sorry.’

‘Madam Zarenyia,’ said Cabal in a taut undertone. ‘I think we should be making a sharp exit at about this time.’

She seemed to ignore him yet again, but this time she turned, her legs cascading back and forth as she did so until she was facing the tunnel. ‘Yes, darling.’ Her voice was strange and faraway, as if she was thinking of something else entirely. ‘I think you should. Run along now, you and Miss Smith.’

Cabal looked around. It wasn’t immediately obvious where exactly they should run; the cordon of demons was tight and unbroken. He looked up at Zarenyia and saw she was looking him in the eye, and her face was sad. She nodded towards the tunnel. ‘Off you pop, Johannes, there’s a dear. Take Miss Smith with you, and good luck.’

Perhaps Hell is seismically active, for Cabal felt the ground shift beneath his feet, or perhaps he didn’t. His legs grew weak. His stomach squirmed. ‘Madam Zarenyia, you can’t mean…’

‘Her Highness, the Princess Zarenyia.’ Satan unfolded his Jacob’s ladder of a body and grew huge and hateful. The horse’s skull leered down from beneath the glimmering Roman helmet, reflecting a dim orange glow as the lake around them grew hotter and hotter. ‘Show a little respect, Cabal. You are in the presence of royalty.’

‘Zarenyia, please…’ Cabal realised that for the first time he was honestly, truly pleading for his life. All the times he had not deigned to do so, because of all those other times he had gone into danger with contingency plans already in place or he had seen a flaw in the deathtrap, an oversight in the ambush. This was the first time the noose was around his neck, and the contingency plan was drawing it tight. He searched for something, anything that might bring her back to his side.

‘You … you dibbed.’

‘Her Highness’s promise was not to hurt you, I understand?’ said Satan. ‘Well, she shan’t. The citadel needs no help to do its work. Or, of course, you could try to make a run for it here. I would be fascinated to see how many steps you manage. Just think, Cabal, it was in this very chamber that you humiliated me. And now this happens.’ Beyond the demons, the surface of the lake cracked and lava slipped through, the solid surface breaking up as ice floes do in the arctic spring. Satan looked around with palpable satisfaction. ‘Now I shall have good memories of the place. Quite cosy, actually. I may move my court here. Tradition is a fine thing, isn’t it?’

‘Hurry along, Johannes,’ said Zarenyia. Her smile was false and her eyes tortured. ‘Go on. Don’t want to keep the old Ivory Citadel waiting now, do you?’ Her synthetic gaiety cracked in her throat.

‘We trusted you,’ said Miss Smith. She pointed at Cabal. ‘He trusted you, and he doesn’t trust anyone. How could you?’

‘Ha ha ha ha, foolish mortal.’ They were just words drawn from a penny dreadful, as impersonal as a motto in a Christmas cracker. Zarenyia’s eyes darted to the tunnel. ‘Go meet your fate. Go on!’

Her eyes met Cabal’s, and he understood. ‘Very well,’ he said quietly. He turned to face Satan. ‘You win, Ragtag Slyboots.’

‘Must you call me that? It seems very petty at this juncture.’

‘It’s your true name. Before all your airs and graces. Call yourself Ratuth Slabuth or even Satan, but you’re still the same milk-souring non-entity you ever were beneath it all. You have been lucky, not clever. At least I shall finally be shot of you. Yes, you win. Congratulations.’ He held out his arm to Miss Smith. ‘Shall we? Our fate is sealed. We may at least go to it with dignity.’

Miss Smith removed her crown and tossed it at Zarenyia’s feet. ‘You’ll need to look the part, princess,’ she said. Then she took Cabal’s proffered arm and, like a couple promenading in the park on a Sunday afternoon, they entered the tunnel.

Zarenyia said nothing, but she took up the crown as if it were precious to her, and carefully donned it.

Satan watched them go with enormous satisfaction, soured only by a lack of polite grovelling on Cabal’s part. That would have been enjoyable, but one cannot have everything. Still, at least he had the pleasure of watching the infuriating mortal go to his oh-so-richly-deserved final deserts. Miss Smith was blameless in the affair, but Satan being Satan, collateral damage was a perk rather than a liability. There they went, disappearing into shadows, betrayed and doomed. Lovely. And here was his new Princess of Hell, watching them go. She could have cackled a bit more as she rubbed Cabal’s nose in it and generally enjoyed her act of wickedness more demonstratively, but that would come in time, he was sure. Perhaps he should run a course on the correct deportment of senior demons.

Indeed, Princess Zarenyia was watching them go with no apparent emotion at all. That would never do. Demons are built of passion, after all. She should be showing something. Satan turned his full attention upon her, and felt for the first time a slowly wiggling qualm in his consciousness. Something was not right here.

‘Your Highness.’ His voice was low with suspicion. ‘We should be going. I shall order that the tunnel be sealed permanently.’

Then Zarenyia turned to him, looked him in the eye sockets with an insouciant smile, and said, ‘You do that, poppet.’

Suspicion crystallised into certainty. He growled with sudden anger. ‘What have you done?’

Out in the lava lake, the last floating stone floe rolled and sank beneath the glowing surface.

‘Me? Oh, nothing. Nothing at all. Just done a betrayal, like you said I should.’

‘What are you saying, devil? That you have betrayed me?’

The lava started to glow a cherry pink, and the heat in the chamber became stifling as Hell itself responded in kind to Satan’s growing fury.

‘Only sort of, darling.’ The smile remained broad, but her eyes narrowed. ‘You might call it a sin of omission.’

*   *   *

Miss Smith was disgruntled by the speed with which Johannes Cabal sought annihilation. As soon as a twist in the tunnel hid them from the view of the collected demons, he had quickened his gait from a sober ‘man walking to the gallows’ pace to a ‘if we don’t get a move on, we shall miss our train’ semi-trot.

‘I am not so very keen to see the Ivory Citadel, Cabal. If you want to rush off there, be my guest, but I plan to take my time.’

For his reply, Cabal pulled her down behind a boulder. For her reply, she belaboured him with her parasol. ‘I am very much not in the mood,’ she said as she rained blows upon his head and shoulders. ‘You should have asked earlier. Nicely. Over dinner.’

‘Madam.’ Cabal sounded pained, if not necessarily physically. ‘You may belabour me with your parasol later at your leisure. At this instant, however, I would appreciate it if you desist.’

Miss Smith desisted. ‘Then why are we hiding behind a boulder? You heard that house of cards with the skull and a hat; they’re going to seal off the tunnel. There’s no going back.’

Ruminating upon just how much of his life seemed to consist of explaining to women why they were hiding behind things, Cabal reached into his jacket and drew the little Senzan pistol from its holster. ‘Do you know how to use a gun?’

She accepted the weapon with distrust. ‘Of course I don’t. I’m a witch these days. It’s all wands and fell powers.’

‘I am not sure your “fell powers” will work in this environment, but I am confident bullets will. They are of my own design and will have some effect even upon demons. They may not kill demons, but I guarantee it will be very upsetting to them, all the same. The device is simple; release the safety catch thus, aim along the top of the weapon much like pointing, squeeze the trigger. Repeat until some sort of resolution occurs.’

Miss Smith glanced dubiously at him. ‘And while I’m irritating demons, what will you be doing?’

‘Irritating them alongside you.’ He opened his Gladstone bag and withdrew from its depths the bulky form of a Webley .577 revolver.

Her dubious expression darkened. ‘Why do I get the girly little gun?’

He handed her the revolver. She weighed it against the semi-automatic for a moment and then handed the Webley back. ‘Unwieldy, isn’t it? Very well, so you have your artillery piece and I have my bijou little demon-botherer. Is there a plan, or is this just a tantrum that involves firearms?’

‘To be candid, I do not know for a certainty. The plan, if it exists, is not mine.’

‘Then whose?’ Miss Smith popped her head up to peer over the boulder and up the tunnel. ‘Zarenyia? Didn’t she just betray us?’

‘I do not know that, either. It certainly looked like a betrayal. I suspect not of us, however.’

*   *   *

Satan, previously Ratuth Slabuth, née Ragtag Slyboots, was prone to a certain footling administrative wiliness that, in a poor light, might be construed for cunning. He liked to flatter himself that his coup had been a masterpiece of patient scheming and that his was the triumph of that quiet man, but the truth was he had been lucky. He lacked for the killing instinct that had promoted the previous Satan’s cabinet of princes and generals to positions of power, but his own position with that group had always been that of a reliable factotum, not of a trusted confidante. When he had been given a simple task of elementary perfidiousness to perform, he had failed in it and been demoted to the non-commissioned ranks for it. He had hated Cabal for the humiliation, but then it is the habit of small men—and demons—to blame others for their failings.

These failings were multitudinous, and it truly was only a matter of time (and little time at that) before some imp or minor devilkin with an ounce of nous overturned the order once more. One such failing was a general heedlessness, an incipient lack of sagacity that coloured, or rather failed to colour, his every action. If there was a princedom available for complacency, Ratuth Slabuth would surely have risen to it long ago.

In this particular case he had failed to do what Zarenyia had been doing whenever she had a moment since learning that this Hell was indeed the Hell; she had been testing the bounds of its reality. It struck her as reasonable that, since the Five Ways had brought them there via an entrance woven at the continuum of its reality and what we may laughingly call our own reality, that it would also provide an exit when necessary. She had not been able to detect it, only tasting the decaying weft that briefly connected Hell to the endless cemetery and was now too fragile to return across.

Then, as this penny-ante Satan she so roundly loathed had smugly laid out his silly master plan to destroy Cabal utterly, she had felt the glimmering formation of the hoped-for exit. It had come from Satan’s mouth, born on glowing threads of eventuality and recourse; it had risen from the plan of Lucifer’s tower that he showed her; it had grown in the air like the scent of nearby water. The Ivory Citadel. Perhaps most of the time it was indeed the home to the final death, but—for a short engagement only—its place would be taken by the path through the Five Ways.

So she had played along, she had fooled Satan, and the most depressing part of it all was that it had been so easy. He really wasn’t up to the job.

‘You’re really not up to this job, are you?’ Zarenyia laughed. She would be destroyed soon, she knew, but better this than rotting of boredom in a palace, burdened by a meaningless title bestowed by a fool. She nodded at the encroaching crescent of demons. ‘You can do much better than this idiot, you know. I am only amazed that he’s lasted this long. Any of you could do a better job. Well, not you exactly, darling—sorry to raise your hopes.’ A demon with the face of a rhinoceros, the intellect of a rhinoceros, and the ego of a shy virgin, stood crushed. ‘But the rest of you with a few wits about you. You would make a far better Satan.’ She nodded directly at one of them illustratively as she spoke, a thing like a wilful rag doll made from spite and gingham that, incidentally, smelled of aniseed. Zarenyia’s attention moved on, so she did not see the diminutive demon nod slowly. Mimble Scummyskirts liked the sound of that.

Ratuth Slabuth—he truly did not deserve the title of Satan—withdrew his own senses. He had felt the edge of his domain where it tended into the dreadful negative of the Ivory Citadel fade into something else. The Five Ways. It could only be the Five Ways.

‘Why?’ he roared, his anger raising the inferno about them. The lava bubbled. ‘I offered you everything! Why would you throw everything away for that … that shit, Cabal?’

‘Language, sweetheart. And, here’s a pointer for the future, should you have one. Tempting people involves offering them something that they actually want. I never really knew what I wanted, you see. I thought I would be happy with adventures and murder, and in no way am I deprecating them—adventures and murder are super fun. But I found something else. My funny little friend. I know humans live so briefly, and it should not concern me when that span is shortened further still. But you, Ragtag Slyboots … I was not about to betray my friend, my only friend, for the likes of you. So.’ She smiled brightly, but her eyes were sad, her remaining time brief. ‘Why don’t you take your palace and your pretty pink princess tiara, and stick them up your non-Euclidean arse?’

She turned and fled.

*   *   *

Zarenyia had little enough of a plan, and what she had consisted of ‘Fight until they kill me; give Johannes and the chippy little thing with the parasol time to escape.’ It was elegant in its simplicity, and modest in its aims, unburdened as it was with anything approaching an exit strategy. She would fight in the tunnel to limit the number of challengers who might engage her at once, and she was fairly confident that she would last a few minutes at least. She would also have the tactical advantage of experience; she did a lot of hunting in the tunnels of the outer darkness—mainly of demons who had become lost at the furthest marches of Hell—and had a few tricks up her angora sleeves.

Her rapid retreat had caught Ratuth Slabuth—she really couldn’t think of that nincompoop as Satan a second longer—on the hop, but now she heard him roaring orders that substituted bluster for authority. If nothing else, she thought she might have fatally undermined His Satanship. It would have happened sooner or later in any case, but now she felt sure it would happen a great deal sooner. If Satan couldn’t be relied upon to successfully deal with a couple of mortals, really, what was he good for?

Fifty yards into the tunnel, she found a useful narrowing and skittered to a halt, performing a full turn as she did so. The pack leaders of the pursuing party were not far behind, but they were small and fleet rather than large and dangerous. She speared the first on a foreleg, tossed its convulsing body into the air with a careless flick, and batted it down the tunnel at its fellows with her other foreleg, forcing them to scatter or be knocked over.

In the breath the attack allowed her, she ran up the wall, trailing silk, and then allowed herself to fall from the ceiling. It was an ugly way to build a web, but she doubted they would afford her the time to do a proper job. She was fighting under disadvantages greater than merely numbers. She was a weaver of traps of assorted forms, and the close press of the enemy prevented her from doing so. Further, her succubine abilities were of little use when confronted by so many. Ideally, she’d ask them to queue up and take a ticket while she dealt with them one by one—male, female, indeterminate, or anywhere else on the spectrum, she was confident of popping just about anyone and anything’s cork in the most terminal of ways. Demons, however, were appallingly uncouth, and this Satan was no gentleman.

A scurvy of imps ran at her with spears, trying to overwhelm her with numbers, but she raised the bladed barbs along the ridges of her legs and scythed them down as easily as wheat in a field, the kind of bad-smelling wheat that bleeds all over the place and complains bitterly about being harvested.

The entrée completed, the main course arrived. Zarenyia faced them with more evident confidence than she felt. She was beginning to think that lasting even a few minutes might turn out to be optimistic, for here came Grith demons, hollow-eyed spectres of misery, bearing broadswords. These were not cannon fodder by any means; Ratuth Slabuth did not care to wear her down first. Fine, she decided. If he didn’t mind losing a few elite troops simply because he was in a foul dudgeon, that would count against him, too, when the butcher’s bill was reckoned up. She would be very dead by then, but you can’t have everything.

The first ran at her, sword trailing in both hands, ready to swing. She saw another start its run almost immediately and saw their reputation was deserved. This was no hasty attack, but rather a practised team manoeuvre. While she was dealing with the first, the second or third would already be killing her. Very well, she would just have to spoil their party piece.

She moved to engage the first of the Grith, but instead of fighting it, she suddenly changed course and ran up the wall past it. It swung to follow her, and so didn’t realise the attack was coming from the side. Zarenyia was still trailing silk. It caught the Grith under the armpit, and it barely had time to realise the sticky cable had snagged it when Zarenyia released her end and the Grith was yanked off its feet and off towards where she had begun the frame of her apparently unsuccessful web.

Its fellows did not hesitate at all as their comrade vanished off into the gloom with a despairing cry, but Zarenyia had not expected them to. They would already be moving to a secondary plan, and this, too, she would have to outwit. She flipped forwards and landed behind the two remaining Grith, ready to fight. One she smashed aside with a hard flick of her No. 3 Port leg. The other came at her, sword back to swing. Zarenyia feinted right, then swung back and left, the tip of the demon blade only just missing the threads of her angora sweater. She moved forwards hard, grabbing the Grith’s sword hand with her own and swinging it in a half circle so they were facing the same direction. It struggled to no avail; the demon was strong, but the devil was stronger. It was held helplessly, its sword pointing uselessly down the tunnel.

‘Now, now, poppet,’ she whispered in its pointy ear, ‘I like my boys to lead with their weapons. Now, show me how you use it.’

Out of the gloom swung a frantic shape, the first of the Grith to attack and still fixed firmly to the end of the silk line. Neither it nor the one Zarenyia held had even half a moment to react before the first swung directly onto the second’s sword, the night-black blade easily piercing it to emerge in a welter of innards from its back. The sword’s tines caught on its victim’s ribs. Zarenyia released the Grith and let it swing away clinging to the corpse of its comrade. Now its rhythm was broken, it would be easy meat in a moment. In the meantime, however, she had the third to …

The third had recovered more quickly than she had allowed. To a round of guttural cries and whinnying shrieks of delight from the rest of the demons, the third Grith landed on Zarenyia’s back. She spun, kicking like Sleipnir in a mood, but the demon grabbed her hair close to the roots with its free hand and hung on.

‘No hair pulling, you dirty little bastard! Ow!’ Then she felt the blade touch her throat and realised she was not going to even last a few minutes. It saddened her; she’d hoped her last stand might have been something legendary, but she’d been in literary disagreements with higher body counts. It was very disappointing.

There was a sharp little sound and the blade swung away from her throat. She braced for the blow, wondering a little why the Grith didn’t simply draw the edge across her throat, then she wondered what cunning ruse the Grith intended by falling from her back, and then she wondered how one gets Grith brains out of angora.

Miss Smith watched the tumbling body with some satisfaction. ‘You’re right,’ she said to Cabal. ‘It seems easy enough. I wonder if that was a fluke, though.’ She turned and shot the second Grith from the swinging corpse of the first as it tried to free its sword. ‘No. No fluke.’

Zarenyia was, by turns, delighted and horrified. ‘You’re back! You idiots! Run!’

‘I shall not, madam. Miss Smith may, if she cares to, but speaking for myself’—here he paused to put a .577-calibre hole in the face of a belligerent cacodemon—‘I do not care to abandon one of the very few entities in whose presence I am content.’

‘Kill them!’ cried Ratuth Slabuth, borrowing his imperatives from The Big Black Book of Obvious Utterances for Megalomaniacs. ‘Kill them all!’

His horde of demons surged forwards, driven less by obedience to—as far as Satans went—the lesser of two evils, and more by a general appetite for violence.

‘There’s no point in us all dying,’ said Zarenyia, backing once more into the throat of the tunnel to limit the attackers’ options.

‘There’s no point in any of us dying,’ said Cabal. ‘There’s no need to cover our backs. An orderly fighting retreat will take us out of here.’

‘Just out of interest, do you have very many more bullets for these guns, Cabal?’ Miss Smith’s own pistol ran dry as she spoke, the slide locking in the rear position to tell her she was in trouble.

‘Ammunition. Of course. Here.’ Cabal tossed her an extra magazine, realising as he did so that her pre-skirmish briefing could have been more detailed.

‘What do I do with this?’ she said, brandishing the caught magazine and confirming his realisation.

‘Release the empty box, slide in the new one sharply until it engages, release the slide catch, and that should chamber the next round ready to fire.’

The explanation was short, clear, cogent, and entirely wasted on anyone who didn’t know what a slide catch was.

The demons pressed close. Cabal revised his tactics. ‘When I said, “Orderly fighting retreat,” perhaps I meant we should just run with the utmost urgency. Starting about now.’

He quickly swapped his Webley for Miss Smith’s semiautomatic, although he was a little dismayed that she took this as permission to start firing with it in a two-handed grip.

‘Jumps around a lot more, doesn’t it?’ she said, shattering the sternum of an onyx demon into shards and splinters. ‘Must feel very bad for your wrists if you shoot it for very long.’

Cabal didn’t trust himself to reply; he wasn’t used to casual acquaintances playing with his Webley. He focussed on returning the Senzan pistol to firing condition as quickly as he could that he might recover his pistol. They once more swapped weapons.

‘I used all your bullets,’ said Miss Smith, without the grace to say so apologetically. She returned to plinking demons.

Lips pursed, Cabal emptied the brass casings from the revolver and stoically thumbed in fresh rounds. All around, the demons pressed closer yet, and he felt the balance of probabilities swing firmly away from simply running away being a viable strategy and towards them all dying in a tunnel in Hell.

He checked his pocket and discovered only a handful of rounds left. There were more in his bag, but he doubted he would have the opportunity to recover them. He would expend the rounds he had, then he would draw his sword cane, and perhaps pink a couple of the distressingly large and muscular-looking creatures that were working their way forwards through the press. Then he would be torn limb from limb. Not exactly how he had hoped the expedition would end, but there were never any guarantees. Zarenyia looked back at him as she dismantled some lesser creatures and she smiled. Miss Smith had run out of bullets again and seemed to be attempting to call down damnation upon the horde with her witchcraft, but—as Cabal had feared—it was of little use in a place where all were damned already. That avenue proving unfruitful, Miss Smith started smiting about her with her parasol, her expression furious and her language unsavoury. Cabal smiled a small smile, too. At least he would die in good company.

At which point it may be instructive to see what was happening more or less at the same time elsewhere.

*   *   *

The dogs were a surprise. As Miss Leonie Barrow, the Great Detective, and her faithful sidekick, inveterate foil, and slightly dim comic relief, Herr Horst Cabal, strolled through the streets of Sepulchre, they found themselves passing one of the mighty metropolis’s great necropolises. The city apparently housed five of them, spread equidistantly around the outer suburbs. Some were grander than others, some more aesthetic. This particular one was the Leosh Street Municipal Cemetery, a bleak sort of place arranged around an imposing if hideous neo-Gothic chapel of rest that stood tall in the centre of the grounds.

Despite it being barely dawn, the gate stood unlocked and swinging in a slight breeze. That in itself was enough to draw Miss Barrow’s attention. The sudden appearance of perhaps twenty mutts and strays of the parish rushing towards the entrance from all directions, squeezing through the gap offered by the unsecured gate to run at full pelt towards the chapel, was another.

Horst was just saying, ‘Well, they seem in a hurry,’ when the clear sound of a shot rang through the chill air to them. Then another, and another.

‘The game’s afoot!’ cried Horst, and then he made a mild cry of pain as Miss Barrow punched his upper arm.

‘I say that, Horst. You just follow me around, stating the obvious. Come on!’ She gripped the lap of her skirt, lifted it far enough to give her feet clearance, and was off while Horst was still formulating an unobvious reply. He gave up quickly—it transpired she was right—and followed her lead.

‘Why are the dogs running towards the shooting? Are they gun dogs?’ Inwardly he cursed himself for saying the obvious thing. The dogs were all manner of breeds and mongrels, as a moment’s attention would have told him.

‘They didn’t all emerge from the same point. They’ve come from all over. That’s interesting in itself,’ called Miss Barrow over her shoulder.

What was also interesting was that the dogs were all gathering at a short set of descending stone steps in the chapel’s shadow that seemed to lead down to its cellar. The dogs were wildly enthusiastic at the prospect of whatever lay behind the door at the base of the steps and danced around yapping happily and wagging their tails at the approach of Leonie and Horst.

‘They seem friendly enough, don’t they?’ Horst patted the head of a red setter. It skittered away from his touch, but did not seem otherwise put out by his attention. It made a short run down the steps at the door and then bounced back, looking at Horst expectantly. ‘What do you suppose is in there? Some sort of sausage hoard or something?’

‘I have no idea, but it may be meat of another kind.’ She was about to elucidate when the sound of another shot stopped her words. The shot was close, yet far away, oddly attenuated, as if it were the memory of a sound. Whatever it was, it plainly emanated from the far side of the door. Deciding that further discussion was a waste of time and breath when the answer was only the turn of a handle away, she crouched by the padlock that secured the door.

‘What a piece of rubbish.’ She was confident that, as a master detective, she would have lock picks stored away in her cuff, just so, and just so she did. She didn’t need to force the skill to use the picks into being; her father had shown her the knack one summer when she grew bored of pressing flowers and painting watercolours. ‘This padlock might as well be made of soap for all the good it is.’ She applied pressure through the torsion pick and set to work with the hook. ‘It’s an insult,’ she muttered. Five seconds’ work and the shackle sprang free. She threw it dismissively to one side. ‘It pays to invest in quality, you cheapskates.’

‘What did you say?’ Horst suddenly had the oddest feeling that things were a little awry. Not necessarily threateningly so, but just wrong in some respect. ‘I have the strangest feeling.’

‘Déjà vu?’ Miss Barrow released the hasp on the door.

‘That, yes, but what’s that thing when you realise a pug has grown to the size of a Shetland pony in the last thirty seconds?’

Leonie hesitated, her hand on the handle. ‘A delusion? Whatever are you talking about, Horst?’ She turned and saw a pug the size of Shetland pony at the edge of the pack of dogs. Nor it was it the only noticeable member of the group. The red setter Horst had tried to pet was now up upon its hind legs. Its hair seemed to be retracting into its body. ‘Oh,’ she said at the sight, a little faintly. ‘That’s unusual.’

Beside her an Alsatian had also reared up. It nodded urgently at the still closed door. ‘Quickly,’ it said in tones liquid and guttural by turns. ‘We must hurry.’

‘This is all becoming remarkably Alice in Wonderland all of a sudden.’ Horst looked around him as the pack transformed en masse into things that were like bipedal dogs, but were not dogs. He looked at Miss Barrow, at something of a loss. ‘I suppose you’d better open the door for them.’

Deciding that doing what the hairless rubbery dog-men wanted was probably a better stratagem than not doing what the hairless rubbery dog-men wanted, she turned the handle and swung the door in. She was not able to see what lay beyond for a moment because the dog-men ran past her in a flowing torrent of grey flesh the colour of cold clay. When they had gone by, only the one who had been an Alsatian for a while hung back. ‘Come on,’ it said in those strange tones. It ran through the door, paused to beckon Horst and Leonie to follow. ‘The matter is urgent!’ Then it was gone, down into the depths beneath the chapel.

‘That is an odd sort of cellar,’ said Horst. He climbed down the steps to join Leonie. Together they peered into the gloom. There was no cellar there, or any sort of chamber at all. Instead, the door opened into a tunnel some ten or so feet wide, roughly hewn into what looked like igneous rock. It ran off at a slight downwards angle, gently curving to the left.

‘A door into adventure,’ said Leonie.

‘It doesn’t have to be so literal about it. After you.’

‘On this occasion, I shall throw your chivalry in your face, Mr Cabal. After you.’

*   *   *

The demons were thinning, but this was less good news than one might hope, as it allowed the larger abominations at the rear of the crush to move forwards. The battle had slowed to a straight exchange of blows between the sides coloured by the certainty that the demons must prevail by simple weight of numbers. To all present, the battle no longer truly felt like a battle, but merely a stubborn avoidance of the inevitable.

Even the sound of combat had become desultory, with demons not actually engaged standing mostly silent apart from the occasional supportive whoop when one of theirs fought well and, far more frequently, a sympathetic groan when a disengaged limb or new corpse hit the ground.

For her part, Zarenyia wasn’t enjoying matters much, either. Her usual method of dispatch was more intimate than a skirmish in a tunnel really allowed for and, while she wasn’t averse to numbers, she preferred them scattered around a bedchamber. At her sides, the humans fought well enough, but they were only humans and weariness was setting in. Miss Smith had abandoned her black parasol in the demonic eye socket in which she had placed it, and taken up a dropped halberd that she wielded with more enthusiasm than skill. Cabal had some practise with his sword-cane, but as the scale of the antagonists grew, it became of diminishing utility. The minute when the defence of their position was no longer tenable was upon them, and they could only congratulate themselves that it had not happened sooner.

Then Johannes Cabal said, ‘I hear glibbering,’ Miss Smith responded, ‘About fucking time,’ and then they were attacked from behind. Except they weren’t. The fleet rubbery forms—sometimes like men, sometimes like hounds, sometimes upon four legs, sometimes upon two—flowed past them like water past stones in a stream bed and onto the demons in a second. The battle took a new complexion as the demon horde found itself abruptly facing a ghoul pack.

‘What is the meaning of this?’ roared Ratuth Slabuth from the executive director’s position at the back. Nobody had the leisure to tell him, so he continued, ‘Ghouls! This is Hell! You have no right to be here! Begone!’

The ghouls replied to this as they fought and tore and bit at the demons. ‘The Witch Queen of the Necropolis called us. Johannes Cabal whose fate is entwined with ours needs us. And you’re just an interim Satan until they get somebody who knows what they’re doing, anyway, so…’

And here, the precise terminology became terrifically rude, for ghoulish glibber is a language flexible and satisfying when it comes to invective, and English may only hint at it.

Then something blurred by and struck a Vinz demon forcefully enough to disengage its whipcord neck and multiple legs from it spherical body.

‘Hullo,’ said Horst. ‘How is everyone? Look, Leonie! I’ve gone all vampirey again!’ This he demonstrated by tearing the arm from a nearby antagonist and then beating it over the head with the flopping limb.

‘How lovely for you.’ Miss Barrow checked her cuff and was disappointed if not surprised to discover that not only had her lock picks disappeared, but even the concealed pocket in which they had been stored had vanished, too. It seemed that her time as the Great Detective was over, and that realisation sent a pang through her. Oddly the pang centred on her shoulder and she realised that there was an unaccustomed weight there. She looked and found a khaki strap running over it that had certainly not been there a minute or so previously. A moment’s examination revealed it to be a sling, and in looking down her body to see what it was attached to, she made certain other discoveries.

‘I have a shotgun,’ she said, and brought the feisty-looking 12-bore pump-action weapon up to examine it with awe at its sudden appearance, wonder at its grim boding, and some undeniable glee as to its immediate utility. ‘And trousers.’ She had only ever worn trousers when helping in the garden or in the garage on her father’s car. They were not something she was used to wearing in polite company, which—she realised—entirely let out her current company.

She considered the shotgun, pushing up the dark, broad-brimmed, and shallow-crowned hat that had also added itself to her wardrobe without permission as she did so. Despite never having held such a device before, she felt inspired to take a firm hold of the forestock grip and pull it back. The weapon made a satisfying sound of steel-on-steel, and something very similar and just as satisfying as she pushed the forestock back to its forward position. The shotgun seemed to become palpably more dangerous in her hands by that simple act. She had used double-barrelled shotguns of lower bore when shooting clay pigeons on a couple of occasions, and knew to shoulder firmly, address her target (a spiny beast that was harassing one of the ghouls unforgivably), release the safety catch with her thumb, and squeeze the trigger. She knew it, but was surprised by how reflexive it all felt to her. Even the greater recoil of the 12-bore over that which she had previously experienced seemed familiar.

The spiny demon went all head over heels and viscera a-tangle as the cloud of pellets caught it in the midriff and ended its harassing days permanently. The roar of the gun was overwhelming in the close quarters, and the battle seemed to pause for just a moment. In that moment, Miss Barrow introduced another cartridge into the chamber to the accompaniment of the lovely positive mechanical sounds, and felt quite wonderful doing it.

‘Run, Ratuth Slabuth,’ said Johannes Cabal. He was not at all sure that the fight was turning, but it was a moment of optimism for his side, and he thought it reasonable that it might be matched by a moment of pessimism for the other. Perhaps a little persuasion might cause their morale to crumble. ‘Just let us go and no more of your creatures need be destroyed.’

The creatures in question seemed to think this was a good idea, and looked to their leader. It was a vain hope on their part. Ratuth Slabuth drew himself up as much as the tunnel ceiling would allow and snarled, the bone of his face curling and creaking to accommodate the flexions of his hatred.

‘Never! You die here, Cabal!’

‘Which one?’ said Horst, unhelpfully.

The attack was renewed, but the timbre of it had changed. Now the demons fought defensively, and were no longer trying to get past Zarenyia, only to avoid being cut or smashed or otherwise having a bad day. Leonie only had to aim her shotgun for the demon in her sights to disengage from combat and scurry back, seeking cover. She rested her finger outside the trigger guard and re-engaged the safety catch without drawing attention to doing so. She could see the enemy wavering.

‘You lot,’ she called. ‘We’re not interested in you. Leave now and we will let you go.’

The demon assault instantly failed. Ratuth Slabuth was rendered speechless with disbelief and rage as his troops ran past him and back out of the tunnel. Some of the larger ones who could not avoid his eye at least had the courtesy to look embarrassed about it.

‘Well, well. Just you and us now, Ratuth Slabuth.’

The arch-demon turned from watching his force slither away like draining cess and turned the full force of his regard upon Cabal and his company.

‘Five of you,’ he grated in a voice of rusted iron and lockjaw. ‘You are the company of the Five Ways?’

‘Indeed,’ said Horst with insouciant bravado. ‘We might well be.’ He whispered from the side of his mouth to his brother, ‘Are we?’

‘I believe we are,’ Cabal told Ratuth Slabuth and, in passing, his brother.

‘Who’s the scaffolding with a cow skull on it?’ put in Horst as a supplemental question.

‘Cow skull?’ Great was the wrath of Ratuth Slabuth.

‘That?’ Cabal pulled a face as if smelling something unpleasant. ‘That’s what passes for Satan these days.’

The clearing of the lines of battle cast the conflict into a new light. The ghouls did not mind spoiling the plans of man and monster alike, but they preferred to do so from the shadows. Having a bit of a barney with a bunch of demons was all fun and games, but when the guv’nor got involved, it was time for a prudent withdrawal. They crept back and, making excuses to Miss Smith about the hour, the venue, and just-remembered dental appointments, into the shadows they once more faded. The sound of glibbering diminished with the rapid patter of ghoulish feet.

Leonie Barrow looked at the shotgun in her hands. It did not seem such a panacea for demonic problems any longer. ‘We should be going, I think. That would seem to be a wise course of action.’

‘Johannes, be a sweetheart and accompany the ladies back along the tunnel, would you?’ said Zarenyia. She manoeuvred slightly, bringing herself to face Ratuth Slabuth squarely. ‘Horst, you seem usefully dangerous. You stay with me.’

‘We can fight,’ said Miss Smith, waving her halberd in a manner potentially injurious to friend and foe alike.

‘We can.’ Miss Barrow regarded her shotgun, and then the curiously geometrical Satan doubtfully. ‘But I don’t think we would do much good. Trust the spider-lady. Let’s go.’

The three backed away slowly until they were firmly disengaged from the scene of combat. Then—Miss Smith pausing to drop the halberd and take up her poor, misused parasol—they turned and ran.

‘Think we can take him, sweet Horst?’

‘No idea,’ said Horst as he settled into a boxer’s stance. ‘We can give it a jolly good try, though.’

Ratuth Slabuth viewed him with disgusted disbelief. ‘Are you seriously intending to fight Satan using Marquess of Queensbury rules?’ he demanded.

‘I don’t see why not.’ Horst experimentally shuffled his feet and tried dodging and weaving. ‘We’re both gentlemen, aren’t we?’

‘I…’ Ratuth Slabuth had to think about that. ‘I suppose I’m meant to be. I didn’t realise that extended to engaging in fisticuffs with fops.’

Horst stopped dodging and weaving on the instant. ‘Steady on now.’ He waved an admonishing finger in Ratuth Slabuth’s face. ‘I’m sorry about the cow skull comment, but that was an honest mistake. I’m not a veterinarian, you know. But that’s no excuse for casual name-calling, I’m sure.’

‘You’re quite right. I was speaking out of … Where’s that wretched spider-devil gone?’

It was a minor feat for a large spider/human hybrid woman with a sunny disposition to disappear in such a small area, but a major one for anyone claiming to be the devil of devils to have lost sight of her. It was not a state of affairs that lasted long, however.

Zarenyia landed on Ratuth Slabuth’s back with a cry of, ‘Peep bo!’ and swathed his skull (of a horse, for specificity’s sake) in silk before leaping clear. Ratuth Slabuth roared in maleficent rage and struck after the direction he gauged her to be in, overbalanced, and fell lengthways down the tunnel. Lying thus, his head was brought closer to the ground than was usual for him. Something else unusual for him was being punched a resounding blow in the face, strong enough to dislocate his jaw.

‘A hit!’ Horst danced pugilistically around the prone body of Satan. ‘A very palpable hit!’*

‘Time to go.’ Zarenyia plucked Horst up and threw him onto her back.

‘I punched Satan!’ Horst was all a-bubble with boyish enthusiasm, she noted. She also noted that he embraced her about the midriff to prevent himself falling off with far more willingness than his brother had ever shown.

‘Yes, you did, darling, and I’m sure we’re all enormously proud of you. But now, you see, Satan is coming after us, and I fear he will be in a frightful bate.’

‘Yes, true. Still, pow!’ Enthusiasm worked out, Horst sobered a little at the proposition of a cross Satan being terribly Satanic on his person. ‘We should leave.’ Zarenyia hardly needed the suggestion; they were already galloping headlong down the tunnel back in the direction from which Horst and Leonie Barrow had first appeared.

‘There’s a whole city back there,’ Horst told her as they clattered along in hasty escape.

‘I know. The Ivory Citadel.’

‘The Ivory what? No, no, it’s called Sepulchre.’

‘It is the place of final death. To go there is to be snuffed out of the now, then, and forevermore.’

‘It wasn’t that bad.’

Behind them, Horst became aware of a curious noise. It put him in mind of a rake drawn over gravel combined with the sense of imminent arrival one gets on the platform of an underground station upon the London Tube when the train is still just out of sight.

‘Can you hear that?’

Zarenyia did not trouble to look back. ‘A frightful bate,’ she said under her breath, and pushed herself harder.

She ran as quickly as she dared for some seconds, which was a very decent speed under the circumstances. She did, however, wonder where the others had got to. The tunnel did not split and so offered no alternative routes, yet—based on past experience—she should certainly have run down three blundering humans by now. Then again, the tunnel should have been heading downwards, but it was clearly rising.

‘This isn’t right. The Ivory Citadel is beneath Satan’s throne. We shouldn’t be heading upwards. We’ll end up in lava at this rate.’

‘No, this is right,’ said Horst. ‘This is the way we came, and it sloped down for us the whole way.’

‘Sepulchre, you said?’

‘Yes. A great big industrial city. I think it’s in the North. Odd I haven’t heard of it before.’

Zarenyia was confident that the reason he hadn’t heard of it was not because his usual concerns rested squarely in the contents of dresses. She reached out her senses and perceived at once that the tunnel through which they travelled had not existed ten minutes before, and would not exist ten minutes hence.

‘We’re in the Five Ways. We can still escape!’

‘What is this Five Ways thing people keep going on about? Well, I say “people”, but I suppose I mean Satan, and now you. So, what is this Five Ways thing devils keep going on about?’

She ignored him—she was sure his brother would be delighted to explain things to Leonie and him in inordinate detail later—and concentrated on not thinking about the inconstancy of the floor upon which she ran. She had to believe more strongly in it than the real tunnel, or she would end up on the wrong one and find herself with Horst trapped between a fatal location and a batey Satan.

Horst looked back and, ignorant of the importance of believing the lie in such circumstances, said, ‘How queer. The tunnel behind us is sort of falling apart.’

And it was, but not in drifts of rock dust and plummeting stalactites. There was a peculiar tearing occurring in Horst’s perception of the tunnel, and two nearly identical tunnels were becoming separated. Oddly, there was also a sense of the living rock being torn open into a cavern as the tunnels grew apart. He felt he could almost see through the tunnel walls, and no sooner had that thought occurred to him than it was true.

Beneath her feet, Zarenyia saw the tunnel floor become translucent. Some two hundred feet or so below them, she could see the real path running like an open road directly to a great castle of domes and minarets, all the colour of old bone. The sight of it filled her with a fear she had never felt before. ‘Stop thinking!’ she snapped at Horst. ‘You’re wrecking the illusion!’

‘I can’t help thinking!’ It was an admission he had never had cause to make before.

‘Oh, for crying out loud.’ Zarenyia took Horst’s hands and moved them further up, a sovereign cure for men thinking, in her experience.

‘Oh. I … Oh, my goodness,’ he said, thoroughly distracted. Beneath her feet, the way grew more solid.

It was an improvement, but not a resolution. The false if preferable path was still merely a thing of whims and fancy, and as fragile as a dream. Behind them it sheered away from the real path like a split twig, and crumbling into nothing from the sheer point to the tip at, presumably, Sepulchre. And also behind them, on came Ratuth Slabuth.

He was prone and his angles were extended so that he gave the impression of nothing quite so much as the living skeleton of a great snake over a yard wide and thirty long. Tatters of silk hung from his skull where they had been torn free of his eye sockets, and his jaw hung at an uncomfortable angle, clacking rhythmically like a loose door to the beat of his run. On his lower surfaces a multitude of limbs created for the purpose scooted him along at distressing speed, yet the sense was still ophidian rather than of a hideous millipede (though there were certainly elements of that, too). His very-nearly-feet things on the end of his will-do-for-legs things slid and tripped at the edge of the fracturing realities, but he was faster to the line of transition if only by a whisker, and more and more of his forebody was gaining the relative safety of the Sepulchrean tunnel.

Johannes Cabal, Miss Smith, and Miss Leonie Barrow had paused in the tunnel ahead, the door to the outside world—or rather, an outside world—just ahead of them.

Miss Barrow eyed it with suspicion. ‘I left that door open.’

Miss Smith joined her. ‘The ghouls shut it, perhaps?’

‘They didn’t strike me as very tidy creatures.’

Miss Smith nodded. ‘They’re not. Astonishingly messy eaters.’ The two women went on to make sure the door was actually unlocked while Cabal hung back. He was pleased to see Madam Zarenyia appear around a bend in the tunnel at full flight, Horst clinging to her by an unorthodox and inappropriate manner. Cabal’s lips thinned; there would be words presently. Then his peevish expression gave way to wide-eyed surprise. He had never for one instant thought that Ratuth Slabuth would press the pursuit without his demons. What could have provoked him into … Cabal noticed that the horse skull’s jaw was sadly askew. He sighed. Just perfect.

Behind him he heard Leonie Barrow call to him, ‘The door’s locked!’ Then to Miss Smith, ‘This doesn’t make sense. It was padlocked on the other side when we came in, but this time it’s the door’s own mortise lock. The ghouls couldn’t have done it.’

‘Can you get through?’ shouted Cabal.

‘I can pick it … damn it! My picks have gone.’

‘Use mine.’

He started to reach inside his jacket for the small leather case containing his own set of lock picks when Miss Barrow said, ‘No time,’ and immediately followed the statement with a discharge at point-blank range of a 12-bore cartridge into the door frame where the lock’s bolt shot home. Miss Smith squealed and giggled with girlish delight at such havoc.

‘Yes, that did it. Ready when you are, Cabal.’

Zarenyia was almost with them. She would need a moment to shed her passenger—possibly two moments, as he seemed very happy where he was—and metamorphose into a fully human form, or she would never be able to negotiate the doorway ahead.

Then Ratuth Slabuth stretched like the most malevolent jack-in-the-box imaginable* and, extending forelimbs made from rage and set squares, snagged Zarenyia’s hindmost legs. She went sprawling, Horst being thrown forwards in a clumsy somersault while bearing an expression at least as disappointed as it was surprised.

Behind him, Ratuth Slabuth felt the tunnel fading away, the conceptual space of a cavern joining the true and apparent tunnels forming in its stead, a great aching space lit from below by the milky light of the Ivory Citadel.

‘I am Satan!’ The loose jaw clacked hideously and a rage beyond sanity twisted the empty eye sockets into parodies of expression. ‘You are naught but dust! You shall be dust!’

His rear body sagged into the chasm opening beneath them, his aftmost limbs scrambling uselessly to gain tread. He tried to pull himself clear of the growing nothingness, but only succeeded in dragging Zarenyia closer to the precipice.

Zarenyia looked back and glanced downwards. The citadel seemed to be reaching up for them all. She tried kicking back at Ratuth Slabuth, but his grip on her hindmost legs was too secure, and her No. 3 legs on either side insufficiently strong and too awkwardly placed to get in any decent blows.

‘What are you doing, you maniac?’ she shouted at him. ‘That place will destroy us all!’

If Ratuth Slabuth heard her, he did not react to her words. ‘Worked my way up from corporal!’ he bellowed. ‘Twice!’

More of the tunnel floor faded away; two-thirds of Ratuth Slabuth’s long body now hung over certain doom. Zarenyia felt herself sliding inexorably downwards. She saw Cabal run forwards offering a hand, as if a mere mortal could hope to drag two such huge creatures back by himself. That, however, was not his plan.

‘A line, madam! A line! Cast me a line of your silk!’

This at least her No. 3 limbs were a match for. She exuded silk from the spinnerets at the end of her abdomen and fed the line forwards to her human hands. ‘Careful! The tip is very sticky!’ She cast the line and Horst blurred across to intercept it, catching it neatly behind the adhesive end. The brothers Cabal drew the line up towards the door. They didn’t get so very far before too much of the tunnel faded, and Ratuth Slabuth fell into space, dragging Zarenyia after him. Horst threw the end of the silk at the tunnel floor and it anchored there instantly, which was as well, for a small part of a second later it came under a great impulse as it took the weight of two warring devils.

Horst looked at the approaching precipice. It did not seem so very far from the line’s anchor point. ‘Johannes? Bright ideas? Quickly?’

Cabal nodded at the silk. ‘That was my bright idea. It’s up to Madam Zarenyia now. We have done all that we can.’

*   *   *

Over the Ivory Citadel, Zarenyia and the second Satan struggled. Ratuth Slabuth made to climb over her to reach the line and safety, but she fought him back with her other legs, and he ended up back where he had started, dangling from her aft legs. Zarenyia kicked and struggled, but he refused to let go. She wished fervently that he had genitals; she could generally be very persuasive when genitals were involved and, as a last resort, she could always have kicked him in them. Alas, he was utterly asexual both physically and behaviourally. It was all most vexing.

Above her the tunnel to safety was flaking away into pieces that dissolved the moment after they were formed. She knew the Cabals would not have been able to anchor the line very much further along. Her time was short. Extreme measures were called for.

She looked down. ‘I think I shall just have to do without you.’

‘What?’ Ratuth Slabuth glared up at her. ‘I am Satan incarnate! You will not cast me aside easily, traitor!’

‘I wasn’t talking to you, you dull creature.’ She flexed her No. 3 legs and their bladed edges extended. Ratuth Slabuth had already dodged their attentions earlier and knew himself to be out of range where he was, clinging onto her No. 4 legs below their last joints and gripping hard enough to prevent them showing their own blades. He looked up past them to see Zarenyia grow dewy-eyed. ‘Bye, gals. I’ll miss you.’

Without a second’s further hesitation, the No. 3 legs hooked over the hindmost limbs close to where they joined what would have been the cephalothorax, if she had been a true spider rather than an infernal representation of one that carried its brain in the head of a humanlike superstructure. The legs closed sharply, scissoring through their neighbours. The rear limbs fell away, Ratuth Slabuth still clutching them hopelessly.

It would be nice to report that he said something clever, telling, or even poignant at this point, but all he managed was ‘Noooooooooooooooooooo!’ all the way down, predictable to the end.

He fell into a courtyard in the citadel. There was a brief milky miasma as of a fog rising and falling in a matter of five seconds or so. And then the Ivory Citadel was just as it had been a moment before, empty and enigmatic, the colour of old bone. No ghosts wandered its corridors, for ghosts were far too alive for it to tolerate.

So perished Ratuth Slabuth, also known as Ragtag Slyboots, also known as Satan (albeit briefly).

*   *   *

Johannes and Horst Cabal watched with growing dismay the failing edge of the tunnel creeping towards them and, more immediately, the end of Zarenyia’s lifeline. They were relieved when her hand appeared, gripping at the edge, but then it vanished as the edge faded into flakes of never-being. They both rushed forwards and took up the slack on the line, heaving like bargemen upon the Volga. A great spiderish leg appeared, followed by her upper body, and then more legs swung over and gripped. Cabal’s relief was attenuated when he saw how uncharacteristically pale and exhausted she appeared. He and his brother helped her over the precipice and into—at least momentarily—safety. Cabal saw she was looking rather more insectoid than arachnid all of a sudden, and was appalled to see the ugly stumps of her rear legs, dribbling ichor from the almost surgical cuts through the patella analogues.

‘Madam!’ His concern was unaffected. ‘What happened to your legs?’

Zarenyia smiled weakly. ‘The Devil took the hindmost.’

Another tranche of tunnel crumbled away behind them. ‘You must transform into human form, madam, and do so immediately! The door is too narrow!’

‘Not so sure I can, after all that. Sorry, darlings, I’m quite pooped. Think I might even be dying. Wouldn’t that be an anticlimax after seeing off that Ratuth wotsit-uth?’

At the door, Cabal could see Miss Smith and Leonie Barrow waiting, the door held open. Beyond it was a swirling gloom. It didn’t look very appetising, but it was surely better than a graceless plummet to the Ivory Citadel and eternal extinction.

‘Zarenyia.’ Cabal leaned close to her and spoke in an urgent undertone into her ear. ‘Please. You must focus. Just for a few seconds. We can save you, but you must help us.’

She laughed a soundless little laugh. ‘Look at you, sweetness. If I didn’t know better, I’d say you cared.’

Cabal said nothing. The silence drew Zarenyia’s attention more than words could. Then she closed her eyes and grimaced with concentration. The transformation was difficult and nowhere near as elegant as the ones she had previously demonstrated, but it did the job. Even while she was still partially arachnid, her skirt still sporting the six legs and her dress itself simple and unassuming for lack of will or strength for anything more grand, Johannes and Horst Cabal were lifting her up with her arms draped over their necks and making the best speed they could for the exit.

It was barely fast enough. Cabal was the last through the door and, as he lifted his trailing foot from the tunnel floor for the last time, he felt it give way beneath him like thin ice. Then he was through and, with no human agency, the door slammed shut behind them.