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Back Happy Hour In Hell
Chapters (60)
  1. DAW Books Presents
  2. HAPPY HOURINHELL
  3. Copyright page
  4. Contents
  5. Dedication
  6. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  7. prologue
  8. one
  9. two
  10. three
  11. four
  12. five
  13. six
  14. interlude
  15. seven
  16. eight
  17. nine
  18. ten
  19. eleven
  20. twelve
  21. interlude
  22. thirteen
  23. fourteen
  24. interlude
  25. fifteen
  26. sixteen
  27. seventeen
  28. eighteen
  29. nineteen
  30. twenty
  31. twenty-one
  32. interlude
  33. twenty-two
  34. twenty-three
  35. twenty-four
  36. twenty-five
  37. twenty-six
  38. twenty-seven
  39. twenty-eight
  40. twenty-nine
  41. thirty
  42. thirty-one
  43. thirty-two
  44. thirty-three
  45. thirty-four
  46. thirty-five
  47. thirty-six
  48. thirty-seven
  49. thirty-eight
  50. thirty-nine
  51. forty
  52. forty-one
  53. forty-two
  54. forty-three
  55. forty-four
  56. forty-five
  57. forty-six
  58. forty-seven
  59. forty-eight
  60. epilogue

Then it struck me, and of all the ugly things I had experienced since stepping off the Neronian Bridge, none hit me harder. This horror around me wasn’t what Hell was really like. Not by a long shot. Lameh had said something about the levels of Abaddon being in the upper parts of Hell, not up where the lords of Hell like Eligor and Prince Sitri made their homes, but not the deeps either. In levels far below us in the great darkness, in the worst of the boiling heat of which this was the merest balmy outskirt, where the souls I had heard on the bridge were made to scream those mind-freezing screams, that was where the real Hell lay. Horrible as this place was, an insult to every sense, a horror to every thought—still, by infernal standards I was in the pleasant suburbs. And if I were captured, I would never see anything this charming again.

At that moment I came very, very close to simply giving up.

Lameh’s mind-whisperings had helped me with some of the geography of Hell but hadn’t given me anything like a detailed idea of how it all fit together, let alone an actual map. In fact, I doubted there could be such a thing, outside of a few broad strokes, because just during the short time I’d been in Abaddon I’d seen a half-dozen passageways made and destroyed. The place grew and changed constantly, like a living organism, a coral reef or something, although the work was done by demons and damned. Between one lamp and the next, a road became two or was filled in; houses were built on top of other houses until they all collapsed, then more were built atop the rubble. Entire neighborhoods caught fire or were shaken down by the intermittent tremors, only to be rebuilt in different form for new inhabitants, often right on the still-screaming bodies of the injured. And they might keep shrieking that way forever, because death can’t release you if you’re already dead.

I had a couple of places I needed to go, but no idea of how to get to them, except that they were both somewhere above me in the great stack of infernal levels. And if you think it’s hard to get directions in a strange city, try Hell. Actually, no, don’t bother.

No map, no directions. How was I going to do what I had to do?

As it turned out, Abaddon had an answer for me.