Frustrated, I heaved myself up and stumbled out to the deck. The Nagging Bitch was in the deep center of the river, and Pandaemonium had shrunk to a distant glow behind us. The Styx was almost beautiful, black and shiny, the waves sprinkled with coppery reflections from the far-off afterlights, the waters undisturbed but for the occasional rolling, cylindrical length of some terrifying river serpent breaching the surface. We had the current and seemed to be making good speed. New mysteries aside, I felt almost hopeful for the first time in longer than I could remember. All I had to do was make it out of Hell and recover the feather, then Eligor would exchange Caz for it. After that—well, if there ever was an “after that,” I’d worry about it then. How I was going to get on with dating a known demoness was a problem of success. I’d deal with it when I had to.

Over what must have been the next couple of days, we raced along the pitchy Styx, past countless disgusting harbors. Riprash wasn’t worried about hiding me from the crew now, since nobody was going ashore, and soon I was spending hours at the ship’s rail watching the coastal towns of Hell slide by.

“Y’see, I been thinking about all this,” Riprash explained to me one night. “It comes to me that maybe it’s time I should be doing something else.”

I was a bit surprised. “Something else? Like what?”

“Bringing the Lifters’ Word to more than just the few,” Riprash said, looking as philosophical as a monstrous giant with a split skull is able to look. “Ever since you brought me that word from you-know-where. I only half-believed Donkeysmile told me a real story until now, y’see, so I never really got up off my haunches to do what I know is right.”

I shook my head in confusion. Riprash explained that a long time before, when he first worked for Gagsnatch, a demon named Donkeysmile had been thrown from another ship, and Riprash rescued him. He found the newcomer to be surprisingly intelligent, good company on the long voyage. Eventually, the newcomer had confessed that he came from somewhere else—in other words, outside of Hell—and passed along the gospel of the Lifters to Riprash. Riprash had been alive so long that he had become, as he put it, “a mite philosophical in my age,” and what the stranger said touched a chord inside him.

I was darkly amused by “Donkeysmile.” If that was what Temuel had chosen to call himself in Hell, then “the Mule,” our nickname for him at the Compasses, had been pretty much right on the money after all. But what had Archangel Temuel been doing in Hell in the first place? Another question that led me nowhere useful.