I expected the Bailiff’s demonic hell gang to laugh in Sedryk’s face and then rip him apart, but as soon as he finished speaking, they all scrambled off me.

  Instead of pouncing, they dropped to their hands and knees and pressed their foreheads to the rusty ground. The Bailiff even pulled his hands out of his pockets for the occasion. Well, his hand and his ragged wrist stump. Those joined the eight Spirit hands flat against the dirt.

  “It’s our eternal pleasure to serve the Night Rose,” he said with his face to the ground. Every word sent up a puff of red dust.

  “You’re damn right it is.” Sedryk’s voice had returned to its normal tone of offended superiority, the command infused by the Miasma gone. He jerked his chin at me. “Get up, meat roach. The queen won’t wait all day.”

  I staggered to my feet, stumbling a little over that Jianjiao’s garotte tripwire. With a shake of my foot, I kicked it off, then took a couple steps toward the Ylef.

  A glance over my shoulder showed the Bailiff grinning sidelong up at me. His yellowed baleen teeth looked even worse in the hellscape’s ugly light.

  He winked. “Be seeing ya again real soon, Smart Boy.”

  Now that I was up and moving, Sedryk wasn’t waiting around.

  “Let’s go.”

  He took off like a bullet from a gun, the red dust swirling in his wake. I poured on the Ki-speed and broke into a dead sprint to catch up.

  “Thanks for that back there,” I told him when I was within earshot.

  “Don’t be. I had no choice in the summons. If it had been up to me, I would much rather have left you to be branded for one of Her Majesty’s lords.”

  I shrugged. “Still grateful. My face would’ve looked crowded with the thorn whip scars and a brand. I’m trying to keep the decoration minimal.”

  Sedryk rolled his catlike eyes.

  We ran on without talking. Our boots thumped on the hardpack, undercutting the howling wind like an eerie trap and bass track.

  The invisible blades kept slicing at my exposed skin, but after a while, the pain got to be more of an annoyance than a distraction. The body hardening must have kicked in, toughening up my Ten-level build. I wondered whether people in the hell dimension eventually grew tough enough that the razor-wind stopped cutting them altogether.

  A glint from my right caught my eye. Sedryk’s face sparkled in the contaminated sunlight. Same with his hands. It took me a second to realize that he was wearing a thin layer of Glass Spirit over his exposed skin.

  So maybe not everybody went the body hardening route.

  Why had Powerful Enemy had chosen Sedryk out of all the people I’d defeated? There were a bunch of more powerful guys to pick from.

  Maybe he’d kept advancing here and his Spirit was super strong? But if that was the case, I shouldn’t have been able to keep up with him, even with my advancement. Back on Van Diemann, he’d knocked me out of the Jade City tournament in a literal second.

  Physically, he hadn’t changed much since dying. He still looked like a stiff wind would snap him in half. Although I couldn’t say much on the skinniness front, either. I’d hit a growth spurt in the months after I’d killed him, so he wasn’t that much taller than me anymore, either, maybe an inch or two. From what I’d seen, that was actually pretty short for an Ylef.

  The main difference I could see was that his eyebrows had been replaced by rows of short bony spikes and his fingernails had turned into claws. But based on the Bailiff’s hell gang, those weren’t anything special.

  I wondered if his corpse was still rotting in the Van Diemann Boglands or if it had become a feral like I sometimes saw in my nightmares. Then I remembered what I’d seen at the Technol’s organitech hangar on Selk. Was that the only way ferals were created?

  “Getting a good look, meat roach?” he sneered.

  Apparently, getting murdered hadn’t improved his attitude.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Are you blind or just stupid?” With one hammer, he pointed at the jagged rocky outcropping on the horizon.

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  “I saw the landmark, genius. I meant, what’s there? What are we going to find at the end of this rainbow?”

  “Rainbow?” His bony brow ridge furrowed. “It is blindness, then. No wonder you meat roaches lost us the war and our Names.”

  I figured it would be faster to move on than to explain figures of speech from a planet he didn’t even know existed.

  “You said something about a queen or goddess earlier?”

  “That landmark is Night Rose Citadel,” he said. “The capitol city of Hell from which Queen Nochekitli, the Goddess of Death, rules. Your Cursed Death Spirit intrigues her. She saw your arrival through the eyes of that band of lords’ men, so she likely would have sent me after you even if you hadn’t summoned me.” He shot me a smirk. “Though you would already have been branded to their lord, so taking you would have required her to give them something in return, and I’m sure she could have been talked out of the exchange.”

  “This queen saw me through the Bailiff’s eyes?”

  “Her Majesty can see through the eyes of all the dead in her realm.”

  Sort of like my remote viewing with my Corpses.

  “She can also speak with their mouths.” The Ylef got a gloating look on his face. “But speaking with Her Majesty’s voice is a rare honor she reserves only for the most trusted among us. As her fastest servant, she often dispatches me to act as her mouthpiece.”

  That explained how Sedryk’s command had sent the hell gang scrambling to bow.

  He slowed down as we came to the banks of a river. At first I thought the slow-flowing waters were just reflecting the sickly color of the sky. Then the razor wind brought the stench wafting toward me. It stunk like disease and, weirdly, almonds.

  I winced. “Nice place you guys have here.”

  “Thank your Spirit that we aren’t approaching the Citadel from another direction,” Sedryk said. “The River of Infected Pus is the least objectionable of Hell’s three rivers.”

  That was hard to believe. “What are in the other two?”

  “The River of Pestilent Blood borders the Lord of Blood’s territory,” he said, gesturing north. Then he swung his hammer southeast. “And the third river delineates between the Lady of Luxury’s territory and the Lord of Mannequins before cutting past the Citadel.”

  “What’s that one made of?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  I took his word for it.

  The Lord of Blood, the Lady of Luxury, and the Lord of Mannequins. And earlier, the Bailiff had mentioned that we were in Lord of Razors territory.

  “How many territories is Hell divided into?”

  “Seven, allotted by Queen Nochekitli to her seven sworn lords and ladies of Hell. Enough stalling.” Sedryk nodded to the thick, stinking currents of pus. “Go. I don’t want to be waiting for you forever on the other side.”

  I realized what he meant. “We’re swimming across?”

  “Do you see a bridge?”

  Another stomach-turning whiff of the river almost made me gag. I judged the distance from our bank to the opposite side to make sure a really good Ki-reinforced leap wouldn’t work instead.

  Nope, definitely too wide. And for some reason, the idea of cannonballing into the middle of that pus was way worse than the idea of wading in.

  But maybe I could force an Option C.

  I took a sword stance and reached into the air at my hip, unsheathing Wrathblade. The spectral uchigatana glowed brilliant purple in the weird light.

  Until the enormous blade appeared, I hadn’t been sure the ability would work here. Once Wrathblade did appear, the fact that it was totally silent instead of assailing my ears with the whispered complaints of the angry dead threw me for a loop.

  There was something eerie about silence when you knew you were supposed to be hearing everyone you’d ever killed hissing at you. You’d think you’d feel relieved, but it was creepy, like they were all waiting until I let my guard down to start yelling.

  “What do you intend to do with that?” Sedryk growled, cocking back his hammers.

  Before Sedryk could decide to preemptively strike, I raised my hands in the universal sign for don’t shoot.

  “Not chop you in half,” I said. Then on second thought, I added, “Unless you attack me first. This is my ride.” I turned to where my creepily silent uchigatana awaited orders. “Wrathblade, fly us across the River of Pus.”

  Wrathblade grew until it was as big as a surfboard, the same size it had been when Warcry and I used it to fly up that waterfall on Shinotochi-Sarca.

  Sedryk took a sharp step back, his cat eyes doubling in size, too. He hurried up and smoothed away his expression of shock.

  “So you learned a new trick,” he sneered. “Don’t think this makes you any less worthless than you were.”

  I didn’t have any smart comebacks for that. Usually, it was the voices from Wrathblade distracting me, but today the lack of them was getting to me.

  I climbed aboard the sidelong blade. “Unless you want to swim, get on.”

  The Ylef scoffed. “I was never swimming. I don’t need assistance just to cross a river.”

  A flood of his Spirit sent a thin, sparkling bridge of deep ruby glass growing from the rusty hardpacked dirt. It spanned the greenish-yellow currents and connected with the ground on the other side.

  Sedryk ran across.

  I flew over and stowed Wrathblade. Part of me wondered if the whispers of the angry dead were gone forever now that I was in hell, but a bigger part of me expected them to start up again at any second, and the longer they held off, the tighter my shoulders and stomach knotted up. I couldn’t stay alert to my surroundings if I was waiting for that bomb to drop.

  The Ylef hadn’t waited, so I poured on the Ki-speed to catch up to his dust cloud.

  Staring at his back as I ran, I went over the possibilities for Powerful Enemy again. Sedryk was nowhere near the strongest person I had killed, but maybe he hadn’t been exaggerating his status with this Queen of Hell. Maybe that was what had made the ability summon him instead of someone with endless Spirit reserves like Hungry Ghost.

  Even as weird as this whole situation was, knowing I’d been saved by the first guy I had ever killed kind of freaked me out more than anything else. If I shut my eyes, I could still see his lifeless corpse lying on the floor of the Heartchamber soaking room. I could smell the steaming water full of healing minerals. I could feel Sedryk’s triangular glass blade snap off between my ribs as Dead Man’s Hand crushed his life point.

  Dead Man’s Hand, not Damnation. I had killed Sedryk before I made my Ten covenant to destroy all unrepentant evildoers who crossed my path, but here he was in hell.

  I wondered what he’d done to get sent here.