I’d made two gold weights, three copper handfuls, and a couple of iron spits in change from the stolen stuff, plus the coins I’d already taken from Vera’s jewelry box, so I was pretty much wealthy, at least for a while. Jewelry dumped and pockets jingling with money, I picked the inn with the least horrifying reputation I could find, a place called the Black Ostrich, that overlooked the stinking backwater where the Styx bellied out into Sulfur Lagoon. I probably looked pretty beat up already, so as I paid I showed the innkeeper my knife, informed him I wouldn’t be sleeping during my stay so there was no point trying to rob and murder me, and suggested strongly that he and the rest of his employees would be happiest if they avoided my room entirely. Then I dragged myself upstairs and went to work.

One of the things I’d bought from Saad’s bazaar was a jug of firewater. Yes, that’s what it’s called, and it’s not the Dodge City kind. It’s made from the waters of the burning river Phlegethon, it’s uglier in the mouth than Riprash’s rum, and you don’t need to drink much before you want to go out and beat some people to bloody pulp. I drank a bit more carefully than that, just enough to kill the worst of the pain from my long captivity and dull what I was about to do to myself.

I’d bought one more thing from Saad’s place, a cracked hunk of mirror glass: very few people in Hell want to own mirrors, for some reason, and there certainly wasn’t going to be one in a cheap hostel like the Black Ostrich. Now that I could see myself, I went to work, slicing lines in the skin of my face and liberally dousing them with firewater, pausing every few minutes to stick my bloody face into the filthy mattress and scream, because it hurt really fucking bad, let me tell you.