His colleague, Edgefast, was a new arrival. Brompton regarded him suspiciously from beneath his helmet. Edgefast wasn’t leaning sufficiently on his spear for Brompton’s liking, and he had not yet proposed skiving off for a cup of tea, or a nap. Instead, Edgefast seemed to be standing up very straight, and he had a disconcerting gleam in his eye, the kind of gleam associated with someone who actually likes his job and, even worse, plans to do it as well as possible. Brompton, by contrast, had not yet found a job that he might be inclined to like or do well, and was of the opinion that such an occupation did not exist, which suited him just fine. A job, as far as Brompton was concerned, was something that somebody made you do when you’d rather be doing nothing at all.

Edgefast glanced nervously at Brompton.

“Why do you keep staring at me like that?” he asked.

“You’re not slouching,” said Brompton.

“What?”

“I said, ‘You’re not slouching.’ Making me look bad, you are. Making me look untidy. Making me look like I don’t care.”

“But, er, you don’t care,” said Edgefast, who understood, from the moment he had set eyes on Brompton, that here was a demon with “waste of space” written all over him.

“That’s as may be,” said Brompton, “but I don’t want everyone to know that I don’t care. You’ll get me fired, looking all enthusiastic like that. I might not like this job, but there are worse ones out there.”

“Don’t I know it,” said Edgefast, in the manner of a demon who has seen the worst that Hell has to offer, and for whom anything else is pure gravy.

“Yeah?” said Brompton, interested now despite himself. “What were you doing before this, then?”

Edgefast sighed. “You remember that time Duke Kobal3 lost his favorite ring?”

Brompton did. As demonic lords went, Kobal wasn’t the worst, which meant that, when he was sticking sharp needles into your flesh, or finding out just how many spiders you could hold in your mouth at once, he would always provide coffee and cake for everyone who was watching, and tell you how sorry he was that it had come to this, even as he tried to fit one last spider between your lips. Kobal had lost his best skull ring down one of Hell’s sewers, and it had never been found. Following this incident, a law had been passed requiring that all of Hell’s rotten vegetables, old food, unidentified limbs, and assorted demonic bodily waste products should be searched by hand before being swept into the Sea of Unpleasantness, just in case anything valuable might have been mislaid.

“Well,” continued Edgefast. “You know all that searching business?”

“You mean, going down on your claws and knees and raking through poo ’n stuff?”

“Yep.”