Fun, fun, fun, any way you sliced it. It’s a wonder more people don’t make Hell a holiday destination.

Considering we were in a building that looked from the outside like some kind of giant tubeworm had excreted it, and from the inside like a bad acid trip version of a Renaissance tower, the drowned girl’s office was surprisingly ordinary. She sat at an ancient wooden desk, the old-fashioned kind called a “secretary,” with lots of pigeonholes to stash things and a large framed mirror sitting front and central in the middle of the desk surface. The windows of the quiet, dark room looked out over a backwater of the Phlegethon called the Bay of Tophet. The whole expanse of river seethed, flames floating on the black boil and sending curls of steam into the red-lit air; the view out the window seemed like a piece of theatrical scenery. The drowned girl herself looked pretty much the way you’d guess. Although swollen in places, she was still slender, the effect heightened by the lank, dripping hair that hung down to the shoulders of her wet, vaguely medieval-looking dress. Her skin was exactly the kind of blue-white ghastly and puffy-at-the-edges you’d expect. Her pale, bleached-out eyes watched me intelligently (if a bit resentfully), but every now and then they just rolled up behind her lids and stayed that way for a while, which left me staring at a very realistic corpse in an office chair.

“I am Marmora.” She sounded like she still had some water in her lungs. “And you are apparently Pseudolus of Prespa,” she continued, reading the sheet of vellum I’d handed her. (I’d decided “Snakestaff” had pissed off too many people for me to walk into Eligor’s and use that name again.) “What is your business with the Grand Duke Eligor?”

Cutting off the duke’s Grand Nuts, I wanted to say, or anything similar that would express my feelings about the huge amount of bullshit I owed him for, not least of which was stealing back the girlfriend I’d stolen from him. “It’s regarding another member of my sect, the late Prosecutor Grasswax,” is what I said instead. “The Liars Sect has sent me here.” They hadn’t, of course, but that was what my forged documents showed. “I just want to ask him a few questions about Grasswax.”

“That will not happen.” Her sour smile was made a little creepier by the stream of liquid that dribbled from her lower lip. “His Grand Ducal Highness is far too busy to see someone like you.”

“I understand.” I hadn’t expected to get an audience, and in fact I didn’t want one, I just wanted a chance to get in and explore. “Who else could I talk to?”