Oh, and chocolate wouldn’t hurt, either. I’d take some chocolate.”
“Let me see,” Ulfur said, stumbling over to where I sat. I held out my hand. “No, not your hand, the Occio.”
“The rock?” I held out my other hand, the one with the bits of twisted gold and broken bits of gray stone.
He frowned at it, touching one of the pieces with the tip of a finger. “I don’t understand it. This is a Tool of Bael. Why would it be destroyed?”
“It’s not a tool. It’s like a . . . I don’t know, pendant or something.” I looked around the bleak landscape, wondering what sort of weird being the Englishman was that he could either make me insane or magically teleport me somewhere. “Who’s Bael when he’s at home, anyway? ”
Ulfur’s black-eyed gaze met mine—he was about to answer my question when he suddenly squinted at me. “You’re . . . glowing.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You’re glowing. There’s a sort of shadowed glow about you.”
I held up a hand. “You know what I think? I think we’re both nuts, me because I let myself get caught in weirdness again, and you because you are seeing things.”
“I’m not seeing things, not in the sense you mean. You’re glowing.”
“Look, Ulfur—” I stopped in the middle of telling him that there was no way on god’s green earth that I was glowing, when I noticed something odd about him.
“Hey,” I said, pointing at him. “You’re glowing.”
He looked down at himself. “This doesn’t make any more sense than the Tools being destroyed. Why would we both glow just because we were banished to the Akasha? ”
“Yeah, about that,” I said, getting up off my rock to circle him. I’d be damned if he didn’t have a faint blackish glow around him, almost like a corona. “When you say ‘banished,’ what exactly do you mean?”
“Bael, the premier prince of Abaddon, banished us here. Or rather, he banished me, and you must have gotten caught in his power during the banishment. He spoke some sort of a curse when he did it—”
Ulfur’s eyebrows rose.
“Basically it means go to hell, you’re banished by Bael’s judgment. I went to a Catholic school,” I explained when he looked impressed at my knowledge of Latin. “I can say ‘of the Antichrist’ in ten different languages.”
“How very . . . useful.”
“Premier prince? That Englishman was a prince? I figured he must be someone important because you and that big chick were ‘my lording’ him all over the place, but a prince? Wow. I’m going to have to tell Jas that I saw a real prince. He seemed kind of . . . evil . . . for a prince.”
“He is evil,” Ulfur said, slumping onto my place on the rock. “The title ‘prince’ is an honorific, nothing more. He’s the head demon lord of Abaddon.”
“Abaddon being . . . ?”
“Its closest approximation would be hell.”
I gawked at him, my skin crawling with sudden horror. “That guy was the devil?”
“No. Not in the mortal sense. Abaddon isn’t what you know of as hell—it’s . . . well, it’s Abaddon. Mortals based their concept of hell on it, just as they based their concept of heaven on the Court of Divine Blood, but they are not the same thing. Abaddon is ruled by seven princes, seven demon lords.”
“And the Bael guy, the man with the wicked fashion sense and plummy English voice, heads the whole place up?” I tried to stop my brain from squirreling around at the fact that the devil had looked at me, had walked right past me, and had evidently been so pissed at the man before me, I’d gotten swept along in his wrath, but I just couldn’t resolve the idea of Satan and the man in the blue suit.
“Yes.”
I breathed deeply for about two minutes, then said, “OK. There’s a guy named Bael, and you stole a couple of pretty things from him. Why, Ulfur, did you steal a couple of pretty things from the man who rules hell?”
“My master made me.” He looked about as dejected as you could get. My heart went out to him despite the fact that I was now in serious trouble because of him. “I’m a lich. When my master gives me a command, I follow it. I am bound to him.”
I pursed my lips, wondering if I wanted to know what a lich was. I decided that so long as I had met Satan, I might as well hear everything. “And a lich is what?”
“I was a spirit. An Ilargi stole my soul, and had me resurrected. When soulless spirits are resurrected, they become liches.”
“The things you learn when you least expect them,” I said, filing away the lich info. “So this boss of yours told you to steal something from the big mucky-muck of hell? Is he insane, too, or just sadistic?”
“Both. I just don’t understand why the Tools were destroyed. It doesn’t make—” He stopped suddenly, his eyes opening wide, but before he could say anything more, he just blinked out of existence.
I stared in disbelief at the rock where a second before Ulfur sat, finally gathering my tattered wits together enough to wave my hands through the air, but he didn’t just go out of my vision; he was gone.
“Well, hell,” I said, my brain giving up at that point and more or less simply curling up into a fetal ball and whimpering softly to itself.
“Not hell, Akasha,” a woman’s voice corrected me. I turned to see two people approaching, one of whom, at least, I recognized.
“Diamond!” The relief I felt on seeing her cheerful little blond self was almost overwhelming. Until, that is, I realized that if I was seeing her there, it must mean she had been banished with Ulfur and me. “Oh no, not you, too?”
“There you are! Margaretta told me that she’d find you, and here we are. Isn’t this exciting, Cora? We’re in the Akasha!”
I looked from Diamond to the little woman who stood next to her. She was under four feet tall, had a bright, slightly brittle smile on her face, and was holding a pamphlet, which she gave to me.
“Good morning, and welcome to the Akasha. I am, as your friend said, Margaretta. I’m the greeter here. If you consult the pamphlet, you’ll find in it many useful details about the Akasha, such as what you can expect during your banishment, a history of the notable figures who inhabit these regions, as well as a biography of our Hashmallim of the month. You’ll see that this month we’re featuring Hashmallim.”
I looked at the pamphlet she shoved into my hands. Sure enough, there was a section titled “Get to Know Your Gaolers,” followed by a subtitle of “Hashmallim of the Month: Hashmallim.” Beneath that was the picture of a large black blob. “Uh . . . what’s a Hashmallim ?”
“The Hashmallim are the Court of Divine Blood’s police force, and they rule over the Akasha.”
“You have a policeman of the month here? ” I couldn’t help myself from asking. It all just seemed too bizarre for words.
“Hashmallim of the month, yes. As you can see, Hashmallim gave a particularly interesting interview regarding the subject of perpetual torment.”
A question trembled on the tip of my tongue. After a few moments’ struggle, I decided I couldn’t hold it back any longer. “Just out of idle curiosity, what was the previous Hashmallim called?”
“Last month’s Hashmallim of the month?” Margaretta thought for a few seconds. “That would be Hashmallim.”
I nodded. It was what I had expected. “They’re all named Hashmallim, aren’t they?”
“Oh, yes. That is what they are,” the little woman told me earnestly.
“I’ve always wanted to see one up close, but my grandmother wouldn’t let me,” Diamond said, looking thoughtful for a few seconds before taking my arm. “Oh, Cora, Margaretta says that they’re having a ‘Meet Your Fellow Damned’ breakfast, and I think we should go. You never know who we could meet—Margaretta says the meet and greets are always very popular, so we’ll want to get in right away to get a nice table. That way we can eyeball who’s there. Wouldn’t it be romantic if you had to be banished to the Akasha in order to find your one true love?”
“You can’t be serious,” I asked her, squeezing the last morsel of disbelief from my emotional center. “Why
