Description: Prologue: Welcome Mat A MOMENT COMES in pretty much everyone''s life, or afterlife in my case, where they can''t help but wonder, What the fuck am I doing here? I have more of those than most people (a couple a week, on average) but I''d never had one quite like this before. See, I was just about to walk into Hell. Voluntarily. My name is Bobby Dollar, or sometimes Doloriel, depending on the company I''m keeping. I''d arrived at this ugly spot by elevator--a long, long ride down that I may or may not tell you about at some point. I was also wearing a body that wasn''t my own, and all my information about the place came from a rogue guardian angel whispering in my mind while I was sleeping. Not that I had learned much useful stuff from her. In fact, most of it could be summed up with the simple phrase, "You can''t even guess how bad this is going to be." So there I stood, just outside Hell, at the foot of the Neronian Bridge, a featureless, flat span of stone that stretched over a chasm so deep that, if we had been on ordinary old Earth, the hole would probably have gone all the way through the planet and out of the other side. But Hell isn''t on ordinary Earth and this pit wasn''t bottomless--oh, no. See, at the bottom, impossible miles and miles below me in the darkness, the really bad shit was going on. I could tell that because of the faint sounds of screaming. I couldn''t help wondering how hard those folks had to be screaming to be heard that far. Also, what exactly was being done to them to make them scream like that? Already I was asking questions with answers I didn''t want to know. Just in case all this isn''t weird enough for you, here''s another interesting fact: I''m an angel. So not only was I headed to the worst possible place anyone could ever go, I was doing it as a spy and an enemy. Oh, and I was going there to steal something from one of the cruelest, most powerful demons that ever existed, Eligor the Horseman, Grand Duke of Hell. What was I trying to steal from Eligor? My girlfriend, Caz. She''s also a demon and she belongs to him. Oh, and when I said I was an angel, I didn''t mean the avenging kind with wings and the Lord''s Righteous Fire to wield against my enemies. No, I''m the kind who lives on Earth, pretends to be human most of the time, and advocates on behalf of human souls at judgement. In other words, I''m pretty much a public defender. So what I brought to the conflict was just enough information to know I was in serious trouble. Me against a Grand Duke of Hell on his home turf--great match-up, huh? I was in what was, without question, the biggest enclosed space I''d ever seen--that anyone had ever seen, probably. All those medieval artists who''d pictured the place, even the really inventive ones, had never thought big enough for this. A wall of rugged stone surrounded me, extending straight up beyond sight. It seemed to be ever so slightly curved on either side, as though the vast cavern itself was the casing of a monstrous engine cylinder. Presumably there was another wall in front of me on the far side of the bridge, the piston inside that bigger cylinder and the point of my visit, the endless tower that is Hell. The bridge itself was narrower than my arms could stretch to either side, a walking surface only about a yard and a half wide. That would have been plenty, except for the fact that beneath the narrow span lay nothing but emptiness--a pit that extended down farther than I could see or even understand, with just enough flickering hell-light to let me know how very, very far I''d be falling if I took a wrong step. Trust me. Like any sane being, I would have rather been anywhere else, but as I''ll explain later, I''d worked hard to get even this far. I had learned how to get here, found an entrance nobody remembered to guard, and I was even wearing a brand-new demon body (because that''s the only way I could travel safely in Hell). I might have been an unwanted guest, but I had already paid quite a bit to take this ride. As I approached the span I gulped a deep breath made gritty by sulfur smoke and the faint but unmistakable tang of crisping flesh. A stone skittered away from my foot and bounced into the pit. I didn''t wait to hear if it made a noise, since there wouldn''t have been much point. You can only stall something terrible so long before all the courage just leaks out of you, and I knew that things would only get worse from here. Even if I made it across this whisper-thin span and managed to sneak into Hell, the whole place was jam-packed with creatures that just plain hated angels in general and me in particular. The Neronian Bridge dates back to ancient Rome, and it''s named after the Emperor Nero, the one who supposedly fiddled while Rome burned. Nero wasn''t the worst emperor Rome ever had, but he was pretty much of a horrible bastard anyway, and one of the ways we know this is because he had his own mother murdered. Twice. His mother Agrippina was the sister of another, even nastier little bastard you may have heard of--Caligula. He married one of his other sisters, but he humped them all. Still, despite all the creepy stuff with her brother, after Caligula was stabbed to death by his own guards Agrippina was rehabilitated and eventually married Caligula''s successor, old Emperor Claudius. Somehow she even managed to convince Claudius to put aside his own beloved son and instead make Nero, her son by a previous marriage, his heir. Once Nero was the emperor-designate, she bumped off poor Claudius by feeding him poisoned mushrooms. Clearly grateful for his mother''s assistance in becoming the most powerful man in the world, Nero promptly turned around and ordered her killed. He first tried to do it with a trick boat that was supposed to break apart so she''d drown, but Agrippina was a tough old bitch and made it back to land, so Nero sent some of his guardsmen over to her house to stab her to death with swords. Family values, Roman Empire style. Nero did a lot of other pretty terrible stuff during the rest of his reign, including burning a buttload of innocent Christians, but that isn''t the reason he got his own little highway project in Hell, the bridge I stood in front of now. See, what Nero didn''t realize is that his mother''s coup in getting Claudius to marry her and raise Nero above his own son was the result of a little bargain she''d made with one of Hell''s more influential inhabitants, a powerful demon by the name of Ignoculi. Now, Ignoculi and his infernal pals didn''t give a (literal) damn about Nero killing his mother--in fact, they rather admired it. But they did expect him to live up to the terms of the bargain his mother had made to put Nero on the throne of the Roman Empire, because Hell had big plans for Rome. But Nero refused to play along. To be honest, he probably didn''t realize how big an operation Hell really was--the Romans had a different religious picture of things, Pluto and the Elysian Fields and all that stuff. It was probably a bit like that movie producer in the Godfather who thought he could tell Don Corleone to fuck off, then woke up to find a horse''s head added to the bedroom decor. Pissing off Hell is not a good idea. Things went downhill rapidly for young Nero, and within a short period of time he found himself off the throne and on the run. He eventually wound up committing suicide. However, the real surprises were still waiting for him. Ignoculi, like most of Hell''s executives, was extremely good at bearing a grudge. When Nero arrived in Hell it was to discover a special entrance had been built just for him. Yep, the Neronian Bridge. A thousand demons dressed in the finery of Roman imperial guardsmen were already there, waiting to accompany Nero across it in the splendor to which he had become accustomed in life. The great procession set off in single file across the abyss, drums pounding and trumpets tootling, but when Nero reached the other end his retinue abruptly vanished, leaving only the emperor and the one who was waiting to greet him--not Ignoculi himself, but Nero''s late mother, Agrippina. She must have made a pretty awful sight, crooked and broken and soaking wet from Nero''s first attempt on her life, streaming blood from the sword-thrusts that killed her. Nero, suddenly realizing that he was going to receive something less than a hero''s welcome, tried to flee back across the bridge, but now Ignoculi himself made an appearance on the bridge, a huge, quivering glob of eyes and teeth that blocked the ex-emperor''s retreat like a ton of angry snot. "Caveat imperator," the demon reportedly said. In Hell, bad puns are considered a particularly ripe form of torture. Then Agrippina grabbed her son in her bloody, mangled fingers and, with strength she''d never had in life, dragged him shrieking through the gate to Hell and the less-than-imperial fate prepared for him. And of course, from what I''ve heard he''s still there, probably down at the bottom with the rest of the screamers. After that, the Neronian Bridge was largely forgotten until I got there, just another monument to why you never, never, never get one of hell''s high rollers mad at you--something that I had already managed, big time. Do you think the universe might have been trying to tell me something? I stepped onto the bridge and started walking. I had been putting one foot in front of the other for what seemed hours when I noticed that the screams wafting up from below seemed to be growing louder. I hoped that meant I was finally nearing the center of the bridge, but it might just have been that lunch break was over downstairs. I looked down, steadying myself against a dizziness that wasn''t just physical but existential. Perspective turned the flames issuing from cracks in th

Please Wait