They landed in a heap, arms still tangled. Bors and Roshad scrambled to their feet, putting their backs together defensively. Salim lay where he’d fallen, ribs aching where the Head Censor had gripped him.
“Where are we?” Roshad’s voice was tight, anxious.
Above, the sky was black. Not the black of night, star-studded or lantern-washed, but a pure, oppressive black that hung low like cloth. Despite the lack of a sun, the ground was still lit with an eerie, directionless light that cast no shadows. The hardpan beneath Salim was cracked and parched, the color and texture of an old scab. Wind tugged at his robes, carrying with it icy grit and the faint sounds of distant screams.
Salim reached up and tucked the amulet back into his robes. “Anyone ever tell you boys to go to hell?”
Roshad’s eyes bulged. “We’re in Hell?” Next to him, Bors calmly surveyed the sea of low hills and sickly scrub, all dark thorns and weeping sores.
“Part of it,” Salim said. “Hell has nine layers, ruled by the nine archdevils. We should be on Dis right now, the domain of the First King.”
“Not much of a kingdom,” Roshad observed, attempting to regain his usual bluster. He almost succeeded.
“We’re still in the Outlands,” Salim said. “Even the devils don’t have much use for this place, except to train their armies. Let’s hope we don’t meet any of those.”
Slowly, feeling like an old man, Salim hauled himself to his feet and began walking. Bors and Roshad flanked him.
“How do you know where we’re going?” Roshad looked around at the maze of broken hills. “There’s nothing here but wind.”
“We’re heading toward the screams,” Bors rumbled.
Salim nodded. “We’re lucky. The Iron City is close.”
“So we’re just going to walk into a city of demons?” Roshad demanded. “And you call that lucky?”
“Devils,” Salim corrected. “Walk into a city of demons, you’re likely to be torn apart before you can get a word in edgewise. Devils are organized. They make laws and obey them. We’ll be safe enough in Dis as long as we have legitimate business.” They crested a ridge and he pointed. “Look.”
Perhaps two miles ahead, the horizon made a right angle, rising up in a wall hundreds of feet high. It stretched away out of view to the left and right, the line of watch fires along its parapets shrinking to pinpricks before vanishing into the distance. Beneath the wall’s spiked top, where tiny figures patrolled, the vertical face was a mixture of gray stone, glistening iron, and masses of what looked like brown and pink flesh. As they watched, a section of the wall’s foot bulged outward, pulling the fortification with it like an advancing slug.
Behind the wall, an immense tower like a needle-thin cathedral climbed into the darkness, its metal thorns piercing the sky. The roar of a million voices followed it up and out, spilling over the ramparts and echoing across the wastes.
“Gods of light,” Roshad breathed. “We’re going there?”
“Eventually.” Salim switched his attention from the wall to the scattered lights spreading out from it, a sprawling network of dirt-walled slums. He nodded toward the closest one, a single hovel positioned away from the others, near a copse at the bottom of the next hill. A sickly candle wavered in the hut’s open window. “First, we rest. Let’s see if anyone’s home.”
The other men followed him down the hill. Roshad’s muttered grumbling cut off as they drew close and saw what the stand of stunted, leafless trees had concealed.
A woman hung from one of the trees. She was naked, of middle years, and so emaciated that bones seemed ready to burst through the pale parchment of her skin. Her dark hair hung in wild, dirty strands around her face.
She was also transparent, the rough bark of the tree visible through the misty wisps of her body. She hung face-out from several large thorns driven bloodlessly through her wrists and shoulders, her toes pointed and dangling several feet above the ground.
Between the trees and the hovel lay a long wooden banquet table. Arranged artfully along its blood-red runner were roast pheasants, bowls of steamed vegetables, fruit-studded confections, and more, permeating the air with incongruously delicious aromas. Salim’s stomach rumbled.
The woman saw them. Her blank face twisted into a mask of rage, and she opened her mouth to reveal bloody, toothless gums.
“Mine!” she shrieked. “All mine! You can’t have any!”
Salim ignored her and walked over to the table. He selected a drumstick and tore it off its chicken. It felt reassuringly solid in his hand. Behind him, the crucified woman screamed in rage.
“Should … should we get her down?” Despite the question, Roshad looked as if approaching the ghostly woman was the last thing he wanted to do.
Salim shook his head. “Don’t bother. She’ll either be caught and put back, or else appear there again as soon as we leave. And she’d likely attack us anyway. We’re in the Ghetto of Outcasts—the punishment for those who were privileged in life, and used that power to take advantage of others. Now they get to steep in their envy for eternity, the things they desire held always out of reach. This table has probably been taunting her for a hundred years.”
Roshad relaxed visibly. “So she deserved it.”
“I didn’t say that.” Salim’s voice came out sharp, and he softened it. “Who knows? Probably she does. But the gods are fickle, and their doctrines conflict. I trust my own judgment.”
“And in your judgment,” Bors asked, “it’s safe to eat the food of Hell?” He nodded toward Salim’s drumstick.
“It wouldn’t be much of a taunt if the food were tainted.” But the big man had a point. Drawing on the goddess’s power once more—just a trickle, this time—Salim guided the energy into the food, then let it flow back into himself. In his mind’s eye, a stream of dark water ran clear and cold.
“It’s clean,” he said. “Eat up.”
The Iridian Fold men selected their own meals, though they picked at the fare more gingerly than Salim. Behind them, the covetous soul continued screaming.
When they were finished, Salim turned toward the hovel. In contrast to the fine banquet table, its mud walls enclosed nothing but a single dirt-floored room. The candle burning in the shutterless window did so without seeming to melt its sickly yellow tallow.
“We rest here,” he said. “One of you should take the first watch.”
“Here?” The trepidation had returned to Roshad’s voice. “What if whatever lives here comes home?”
“Let’s hope it doesn’t.”
Bors pulled gently on his end of the chain, drawing Roshad close against his side. “Roshad is right. Shouldn’t we keep moving?”
Salim let out a long breath. “We’re about to head into the greatest city in Hell, and I’m completely wrung-out. You may have magic in your blood, Roshad, but mine comes from Pharasma, and the crone takes her price. Would you rather sleep here, where it’s reasonably remote, or somewhere closer in, where we can barter with a devil for lodging?”
Bors grunted. “I’ll take first watch.”
“Good man.” Salim sat, putting his back to the hut’s wall and wrapping his robes around himself. His last image was of Bors and Roshad standing in the open doorway, hand in hand, staring out over the broken landscape. Then his eyelids drooped, and he slept.
When Salim woke, Bors was asleep against the opposite wall, Roshad crouched in the doorway facing outward. They’d switched their chain sometime in the night, likely to give themselves more room to stretch out, and it now hung between Bors’s outflung left wrist and Roshad’s right. The big warrior’s eyes snapped open as Salim stirred, and he sat up without any apparent grogginess.
“Better?” he asked.
“Much.” Salim stretched, feeling the tendons pop in his shoulders, chilled blood sluggishly making its rounds. His dreams had been less than pleasant—a common feature of Hell—but that was nothing new. “Lets get moving. Or are you hungry?”
Bors shook his head. “The table replenished itself maybe an hour after you fell asleep. One moment it was as we left it, the next it was as we first found it.” He frowned. “I don’t trust anything in this place.”
“Wise.” Salim stood, shifting his sword belt back from where it had twisted as he slept. “A devil can be trusted to match the letter of an agreement—but also to find some way to twist it against you. If you ever think you’ve won here, you’re probably deeper in their nets than you realize.” He stepped out the door, the Iridian Fold men following. Above, the sky had brightened to an ominous red, though there was still no visible source of light.
Two hills away, their path met a road, a perfectly manicured track of dirt leading arrow-straight toward the city. Figures moved back and forth along it, passing each other in orderly lines.
“They look like people,” Roshad noted.
“They are people,” said Salim. “Not everyone in Hell is a devil. At least, not right away.”
“So what are they?” Bors asked.
“Petitioners, mostly—souls like that last one we saw, sent here after they died.”
“They seem to be getting a better deal,” Roshad said.
Salim shrugged. “Maybe they’re closer to becoming devils themselves. Or maybe they come from cultures that find traveling like this demeaning.” He lifted his chin toward a line of carts being drawn by tall, skeletally thin oxen. “Probably a few cultists and traders mixed in there as well.”
Roshad laughed and shook his head. “Trading with Hell. I’ve met some merchants who would sell you their own legs if the margin was right, but this …”
“Some things are universal,” Salim agreed. “Where there’s a profit to be made, someone will make it.”
They moved down the hill and onto the road, taking up a position well away from other knots of travelers in the winding line. The figures that passed them, wrapped in robes or rags or nothing at all, watched them with expressions ranging from hatred to hunger, yet none disturbed them. Overhead, dark shapes silhouetted against the sunless sky swooped up and down the road, patrolling.
The slums to either side of the track grew denser, fetid shacks leaning against one another for support even as their humanoid occupants—their skin dribbling pus or fused into terrible scales and spikes—eyed one another with suspicion. A few crept from their doorways toward the caravans and were driven back with stares or gestures toward the guardian devils above.
The city’s wall was more than just visible now—it loomed over the road, huge and predatory. From its direction, a new sound rose. Part howl, part moan, it wormed its way into Salim’s marrow and settled there, scratching dirty fingernails against the insides of his bones.
Roshad winced. “What is that?”
“The city’s welcome,” Salim said. “Look closer.”
The road surmounted a final hill and ended at a gate. Nearly as tall as the wall itself, the iron doors could have let a dozen elephants walk through abreast without touching, yet at the moment they were only cracked open wide enough for a few carts. Bearded, red-skinned devils encased in black spiked armor stood to either side holding huge glaives, while above them fluttering imps clung to bladed protrusions in the gates’ embossment.
“Gods,” Roshad breathed. He wasn’t looking at the gates or the devils, but at the walls themselves. Even from a distance, it had been clear that the walls were more than just stone and iron, yet this close, their organic nature was revealed in all its infernal glory.
Pressed between stones like mortar, or pierced through by sharpened plates, souls reached and wept, their half-corporeal bodies distorted into barely recognizable shapes. Arms shot through with reinforcing nails stretched ten feet or more to cradle massive stones, while heads crushed to a finger’s width by the weight above them still managed to blink weeping eyes. In many places, multiple souls were swirled and squished together into a mercifully blank expanse of flesh that expanded and contracted with jerky aspiration, yet always there were a few recognizable features: a patch of hair, a single nipple, a chap-lipped mouth. It was from these last that the walls’ terrible song emanated, the moaning of the great city of the damned.
Roshad turned away, closing his eyes. “I don’t care what they did,” he whispered, half to himself. “No one deserves that.”
“You might be surprised,” Salim said. “But now you know one of the fundamental truths of Hell: no matter how bad you think something is, there’s always something worse.”
“Next!”
The line advanced, and a fiendish guard gestured at Salim. Up close, Salim could see that the tendrils trailing down the creature’s armored chest were less like hair and more like tentacles, their barbed tips writhing.
“State your business.”
“We seek the Fastness,” Salim said, “as emissaries from the Boneyard. We’re expected.”
“You are, are you?” The creature looked the three up and down dubiously, then waved them through. “Go.”
They passed through the gates, Roshad averting his eyes from the great muscle fibers webbing the sides of the wall’s thick, arching passageway.
“So that’s it?” the sorcerer asked. “They let us through, just like that?”
“We have legitimate business,” Salim said.
“But he doesn’t know that.”
They emerged from between the gates at the other side of the killing field, and Salim stopped to get his bearings. “That doesn’t matter. Hell is an authoritarian society—maybe the original authoritarian society. If we were lying and he killed us, he’d just be doing his job—no special rewards. But if we were telling the truth, and he delayed us in any way, he might have pissed off the devils we’re here to meet. If said devils were high enough in the hierarchy, they could have him ground into mortar for the walls, and no one would bat an eye.”
“So we’re safe?” Bors asked.
“No one is safe here.” Salim finished triangulating their position and pointed. “The Fallen Fastness is that way.”
Creatures of all sizes and shapes clogged the streets. Most were devils of various sorts—some blatantly monstrous, others denoted only by hooves or horns on otherwise humanoid frames. Mixed among these were all manner of planar traders, their carts hauled by bound creatures or zombie servants, as well as robed and branded cultists of a dozen humanoid races. A few of the folk they passed looked like perfectly normal humans, and Salim pulled Roshad and Bors out of these last individuals’ way. “Watch out for those particularly.”
Roshad turned to look at the woman disappearing into the crowd. “Her? Why?”
Salim indicated a horned behemoth stomping past, a spiked chain dangling from its claws. “That thing? It’s a product of this place. It’s big and scary-looking, and nobody’s going to mess with it.” He nodded back in the direction the woman had gone. “Now imagine you’re her. What sort of person walks through the Oppidian Maze of Dis as if she’s at the Sunday market, without so much as a visible weapon?”
“A crazy one,” Roshad said.
But Bors was nodding. “One who knows she’s more dangerous than anything she might encounter.”
“Exactly.” Salim got them moving again.
The streets of Dis were themselves an expression of Hell’s perfect order, each avenue and alley spotlessly clean and turning at angles so sharp that the buildings’ edges could draw blood. They were also, Salim knew, an outgrowth of the devils’ megalomania: shaped like a wheel, the city centered on its lord, Dispater, with all major streets eventually making their way to the city’s heart. To either side of their current boulevard, towers rose up in onyx monoliths and golden minarets, a thousand different architectural styles crammed together in precise grids. Not all of them touched the ground—in places the streets passed beneath foundations floating unsupported in the air, or under the arching bridges connecting buildings in complex webs.
Salim’s party emerged into a square sporting huge stone fountains in the shapes of tortured humanoids, their red-tinged waters leaking from eyes and wounds. Salim led the Iridian Fold men across the square, toward a street marked by a fountain of an old man wrapped in tight coils of razor-studded wire.
“How do you know where you’re going?” Roshad asked, as they turned yet another corner. Above them, the sky was a narrow band between the oppressive towers. “I lost track of our direction three turns out from the gate.”
“That’s why they call this part of the city the Oppidian Maze,” Salim said. “There’s an order to it—to everything in Hell—it’s just too complex for most mortals to understand.”
“But you understand it.”
Salim shook his head. “No. But that’s not really how the city works. You can’t actually walk across Dis—the scale here is different from anything you’ve seen on Golarion. I have business with the Fastness, so I’m trusting the city to guide us there.”
“So it’s alive? Like Heaven?”
Salim smiled. “I doubt many residents of either plane would appreciate the comparison, but yes. More or less.”
“So we’re wandering and trusting a city of devils to give us what we need.” The sorcerer harrumphed. “Great plan.”
“And yet it’s working. Look.”
The urban canyon opened up, revealing a system of short bridges arching over two intersecting canals. One was filled with dark water, the other with brilliant red and yellow flames. Rather than canceling out into steam, the two met and flowed through each other without so much as disrupting their currents.
Salim led his companions up to the top of the tallest bridge’s arc. From there, the city spread out in rings around them, its spires the thousand teeth of a great lamprey.
“We’re near the Iron Heart now,” Salim said. “The center of the city. You could have walked your whole life and never made it here.” He pointed to the cathedral-spire they’d seen from outside the walls, its bulk dwarfing the other buildings and a second set of city walls that encircled it. “That’s the Iron Scepter, home of Dispater’s court.”
“And we have to go there?” Roshad asked.
Salim chuckled. “If we do, we’re in trouble. The Lord of the First City is a god in his own right, or close enough. He has no fear of the Lady of Graves. But the Scepter is the center of Dis, which makes it an easy landmark.” He pointed left, toward a blackened structure like an anthill that floated above another open square. “That’s the Tower of Pitch and Tongues, and its walls are made of precisely what you’d expect. At its top is the Market of Breaths, where hooded merchants buy and sell years of mortal lives.” He leaned on the rail and pointed the other direction, toward a distended mound of flesh. At the apex of its blistered dome, a massive bloodshot eyeball twitched and rolled in its fleshy socket. “That’s the Demagogue, the museum where the souls of the worst mortal tyrants sit on display, bound into the walls themselves.”
“What’s the eye for?” Roshad asked.
“Nobody knows. It opened millennia ago, without any explanation. They say that once a century, it sheds a single bloody tear.”
He turned and found Roshad and Bors staring at him, expressions unreadable. “What?”
Roshad waved a hand toward the city. “We’re in the middle of Hell, about to make demands of a bunch of devils, and you’re giving us a walking tour.”
Salim straightened and crossed his arms. “You asked how I knew where we were, and I told you.”
“Of course.” Roshad made an after you motion. “Please, lead on.”
Salim did so. At the end of the bridge, instead of following the main avenue toward the Iron Scepter, he turned right through a stretch of parkland. Leafless trees clawed the sky with skeletal, calligraphic fingers, and thorn vines writhed across black grass and up chalk-white stones. The paths here were as geometrical as everything else in Hell, the plants seemingly afraid to even lean over their borders. Halfway through, the men passed a small stone amphitheater where two twelve-foot-tall devils like blue-gray mantises stood in conference, drawing in a flat plane of sand with ice-crusted spears. Multifaceted eyes looked up, evaluating the mortals with cold, insectile intelligence, then returned to their strategizing.
At last they came to the end of the park. Before them, steps bordered by arch-connected pillars ascended at a steep angle, terminating in a set of tall iron doors. Above, the tower’s featureless gray stone tapered to a knife point hundreds of feet tall, yet at the building’s foot the normally precise lines of Hell seemed to break down. Instead of a foundation, the walls of the tower extended unbroken down into the ground, the pavement around it buckling and tearing, giving the impression of a splinter jabbing into the flesh of the city itself.
“The Fallen Fastness,” Salim said, starting up the staircase. “Where the sins of all men are cataloged.”
“All men?” Roshad tried to look casual and failed. He and Bors lagged a few steps behind.
Salim smiled. “Curious what they have on you two? I’m sure the devils would be happy to show you.” He reached the landing at the stairs’ top and pounded on the doors. “Let’s see who’s home, shall we?”