I found my quarry attended by several smaller demons as he inspected a crew of newly arrived slaves, creatures whose humanity had been so thoroughly tormented out of them that they made no whimper and didn’t even look up, but just crouched in the dirt, wheezing. I couldn’t help thinking that if the infernal Adversary himself were defeated this afternoon, there would still be work here for a million angels for a million years just to begin to repair the damage. As it was, though, the Highest apparently wasn’t feeling too disposed to mercy, or the Adversary was truly beyond forgiveness. Either way, nothing was going to change here until the end of time.

Riprash was a massive ogre twice my size, with huge flat toes and fingers and a face that would have been phenomenally ugly even without the scar, which I’ll describe in a second. He was hairless except for bristling brows, with a smashed gourd of a nose and huge blocky teeth that looked like they could crush stone. But the scar was really something else, if “scar” is even the right word: Riprash had a gouge chopped into his head from temple to nose that had obliterated one eye and covered the socket with scar tissue. I say “chopped” because the weapon was still lodged in there—an ax blade, it looked like. I could see the dull chunk of metal resting right in the meat of the ogre’s brain, because the hole in his skull had never closed. You get the point. Riprash wasn’t pleasant to look at.

I waited until he stopped growling at his underlings. Two of them turned and scurried away, but the third hesitated. It was a hairy little thing like an upright and slightly pear-shaped cat, with an unpleasantly near-human face, and it was looking right at me—really getting an eyeful. Whatever its interest was, I had lots of reasons for not wanting attention, so I glared at the bug-eyed little thing in my best Hellish Nobility Offended kind of way until it got nervous and hurried after the others.

Riprash had noticed me. “What do you want?”

He didn’t sound either interested or friendly, but I wasn’t going to get uppity with the hired help, especially not help that weighed more than my car back home. Lameh’s implanted memories suggested I now looked or smelled (or whatever) like middling Hell nobility, a sort of white-collar demon. That meant I probably outranked this Riprash guy. Yeah, in theory. But he was the strong right hand of an important and rich slave merchant. The stall was one of the biggest at the market, long as a football field and crowded as an Arabian bazaar. He clearly didn’t feel any need to kowtow, and I took my cue from that.

“Talk faster,” he said. “Busy day.”

“If you’re Riprash, I need to talk to you.”