I might have been able to take out one of the monsters with the bullets I had in the crude revolvers. I was a lot less sure about three. And even if I managed to shoot every hellhound dead without having to reload, I still had to deal with Niloch and his huntsmen who must be close behind. I could only see one chance open to me now, so I backed up a little farther, until I was standing beside a wall of partitioned stalls.

“Ah, yes my dear, there you are,” said a voice as rotten as week-old fish. Niloch made a whistling noise and the hounds backed off. The commissar shuffled forward out of the entrance maze, something like a long buggy-whip in one hand, a jagged knifelike blade in the other, his bone-frills fractured and charred. “You’ve led us quite a chase, Snakestaff, but now that silliness is over. I can get on with the important business of making you wish you’d never heard of my beautiful, beautiful Gravejaw House.” He turned his bony head toward the soldiers following him out of the maze; they had to kick the torn corpses of several Blindworm citizens aside to force their way onto the open concourse. “Here he is,” Niloch told them. “You wouldn’t think to look at this puny creature that he could be dangerous, but he is, my sweetlings, oh, yes, he is. So look lively. If he does anything silly, cut him down immediately.”

Several of the soldiers had guns, long and impressively trimmed rifles currently pointed at my favorite person in Hell: me. Others had swords and axes. Either way, getting “cut down” was going to be painful.

“And what if I just shoot you before anyone can stop me?” I asked, turning my revolver from the nearest hellhound and pointing it at Niloch himself, aiming right between those shiny little red eyes. “I could live with that result.”

The commissar laughed, a fluting noise like a breathy, delicate sneeze. “Oh, perhaps you could—”

I didn’t bother to let him finish, because I hadn’t meant to start a conversation, just make him think that’s what I wanted. Like most of these lordlings of Hell, Niloch loved the sound of his own voice. I shot him in the face.

It didn’t kill him, of course, or even slow him down much, but I hadn’t thought it would. You don’t get rid of a major demon that way, even on Earth where the physics are against them. I was more interested in distractions: one of the lifters had chimed its arrival, and I knew it was now or never. As Niloch fell back toward his soldiers, his skeletal head temporarily a blossom of shattered bone, I threw myself at the row of lifter stalls as hard as I could.