All the Gates of Hell (23 page)

Dante would have loved this place
.

Jin had taken two steps down the slope before she realized that she was in full demon form. She stared at her taloned feet for a moment, curious. She didn't feel frightened, especially, despite her surroundings. Just now Jin didn't feel much of anything. Why had she changed, other than this obviously was not a nice place to be? Jin was wondering whether she should change back. Despite its strength and ferocity, or perhaps because of them, Jin didn't especially enjoy her demon form most of the time, and the few times she had, such as when she used it to pound that mugger back in Medias, she'd felt a little sick afterwards. Then one of the nearby firepits threw a small lava bomb that struck her squarely on the side of the head and exploded into steam and tektite shards.

"Shit, that hurt..." Jin reached up and rubbed the spot where she had been struck. It was another full moment before the meaning of what had just happened got through to her, and it was simply this -- if that lava bomb had hit her mortal human form, it would have killed her stone dead. At that point Jin surrendered all notions of walking through this particular hell in her human body.

When it comes to being
Guan Yin
, my instincts are smarter than I am
.

Jin realized that, buried somewhere deep inside her, the same irritating Guan Yin who appeared now and then to bedevil her dreams was alive and working and, when it came to the duties of the goddess, she was in charge, not Jin. She still could not remember being Guan Yin and perhaps never would, thanks to Madame Meng's skillful brewing, but she had to be grateful that there was a part of her who knew how to be Guan Yin at need. It had never failed her before. Jin hoped it wouldn't fail her now.

Hear that,
Guan Yin
? Don't screw this up... whatever it is
.

Jin followed the trail of the golden thread. She wasn't in a particular hurry, despite her awful surroundings. Now and then she caught herself dallying, such as the time she paused to watch a pack of demons flogging several people into climbing one of the seared trees. Embedded in the trunks and branches of those trees were the same volcanic shards that resulted from lava bombs like the one that had struck Jin; the people climbing the trees were being cut to ribbons. Jin wanted to feel sorry for all the people being tortured, except they weren't making it easy for her. They screamed, they cried, but through it all Jin saw no fear, only anger. They cursed at the demons driving them, cursed the trees, cursed at Jin as she walked by, and through it all lashed out at each other even as the demons lashed them.

All that torment and pain, and all they can feel is rage
?

As much as she wondered about this, she wondered even more why she had stopped to watch it. Jin wondered if, perhaps, there was a principle here that she was overlooking, but for the life of her she couldn't quite see it. She shrugged and kept walking.

The tug at her wrist was persistent but not frantic. Jin knew that there was no particular urgency, so why did it feel wrong to her that she did not want to proceed with any urgency? After all, her whole purpose here was to free someone suffering in hell and help them move on to whatever came next for them. Shouldn't she want to hurry? Hadn't whoever it was suffered enough, or at least enough of this particular hell?

One quick trip to Madame Meng's fountain terrace and they'll just be back in hell...well, a different one, anyway. What difference does it make
?

Jin thought of the little girl she'd freed from the corridors of hell on her first day on the job. It had made a difference to her. It had made a difference to Michiko, and Buddy, and even that silly man counting lemons. It mattered, even if she didn't pretend to understand precisely why.

Jin's taloned feet sank a bit into the sand under her weight with every step. Jin paused for a moment to look behind her at the trail of dark footprints she'd left behind her. Jin almost giggled. It looked like pictures she'd seen of a volcanic sand beach in Hawaii. Certainly nothing at all like Ship Island...

Jin stopped. Ship Island. Footsteps in the white, white sand. She'd gone with Joyce on a quick weekend trip...what? A year ago? Didn't seem so long. It was Joyce's idea. She'd said Jin was much too gloomy for someone her age. She needed to get out, have a little fun...

Jin finally understood why she was dragging her feet in this unnamed hell. It was because, when she finished here, it was back to Medias and what was waiting for her there. And who wasn't. Suddenly the current hell didn't seem quite so bad.

Maybe I'll just stay here. It's sort of like being on the beach. Except for the firepits and no ocean, but that's ok. Just as well Joyce isn't here, though, she loved the ocean... oh, damn
.

Jin had a thought. She didn't want it; she'd have given anything that was hers to offer to be rid of the horrid thing, but it was too late for that. The thought Jin had was that, perhaps, Joyce was there after all. Oh, Jin knew it was almost certainly not true. As she understood things, Joyce would be reborn in Medias, to try again to learn whatever lesson her premature death may have prevented her from learning the first time. Madame Meng had said as much. Still, Jin couldn't not be entirely sure. It wasn't as if Jin had known for certain where Joyce was going to go after her visit to the Tenth Hell. She could be anywhere. She could be one of those screaming people bleeding on one those jagged-edge trees. Jin walked a little faster from that point on, and she took far less interest in what she might see to the left or right as she followed the golden thread.

The place it led her to was not quite so full and noisy as the plain she'd just crossed. There were still the blackened trees, but they were empty of either people or the bloody remnants of them. Jin wondered, when she thought of the bloody wounds on the people she'd seen so far, if they would die there, and then be reborn right back where they'd started, just in time for their next turn on the tree. Perhaps, that seemed to be the way most of the hells worked, though the idea of someone giving birth in that place struck Jin has highly unlikely.

Maybe they just reappear, just as those who finish with a hell simply vanish. Different hells, different methods
?

Possibly. Perhaps that was why all hells had devils, but not all devils were visible. Even though Jin had the unshakeable feeling, somewhere deep in that Guan Yin inside her, that at heart all the hells were the same. She knew it wasn't true, at least not on the surface, yet she had a hard time shaking the notion and didn't see any particular reason to try.

In the distance Jin saw a dark mountain spire of what looked like granite rising from the plain. She thought perhaps the person she was looking for was there, since that was the way the thread was pulling. It was only when she got closer that she realized that her path led down, not up. Around the base of the mountain the sand had either sunk in or blown away to reveal a deep valley; it reminded Jin just a little of the vast valley system that almost surrounded Madame Meng's mountain palace in the Ninth Hell, but this one was not nearly so grand; she estimated it was no more than about a hundred feet deep, with slides that sloped fairly steeply down but were more rock than sand. Jin stepped to the side as a nearby firepit shot ash and lava bombs in all directions, then picked her way through the resulting smoking piles of slowly cooling rock as she made her way down toward the valley floor.

Now that Jin was a little more acclimated to her surroundings, she noticed something definitely odd about the section of valley floor in front of her. Rather than the haphazard arrangement of firepits, black sand, and old lava fragments that made up the rest of the landscape, the valley floor in front of her, a section about forty yards wide that abutted the base of the mountain, had a certain...ordered, quality about it, something that she had seen nowhere else in that hell. Yes, there were some large stones and the ubiquitous black sand, but there was also an almost total lack of small bits and rubble. More, the sand itself was ordered. Rather than flat and windswept, it was arranged into long narrow ridges that seemed to almost flow past the few large stones there, as if she were looking at miniature islands in a black water sea. For a moment Jin just stopped and stared at it in wonder, idly rubbing the spot on her head that was still sore from being smacked with that lava bomb. She was certain that she'd seen something very much like this before, if only she could remember!

Oh
.

Jin did remember, though she was having a great deal of trouble believing that what she saw once on a trip to Memphis years ago was the same thing she was looking at now -- a zen garden.

In hell.

Jin ignored the faint tugging at her wrist for a few moments as she carefully traced out the limits of the garden. She was very careful to stay just outside the boundary as she paced off the length. It was around forty feet long and about the same across, and bordered on three sides by a line of flat stones, almost like paving stones. They were rough and unpolished, but apparently carefully selected for the purpose. The base of the mountain itself formed the fourth side, and within those boundaries the chaos of hell was kept at bay. Here and here alone all was ordered and serene. Jin just stared at it for a very long time as if the meaning of it would unravel before her and the place would explain itself to her, but nothing happened. Jin finally shrugged and let the golden thread tug her further down the valley to where a demon was torturing a little girl.

"Mommy used to whip me too," said the child, who appeared no more than eight or nine years old. She lay draped over two dead limbs of one of the cutting trees. Her voice was weak, and blood dripped from her arms and legs to pool in the dark sand beneath the tree. Yet, faint as the voice was, Jin heard every word.

"I'm sure she meant well," said the demon. "Try not to think too badly of her. Is that the highest you can go?"

Jin was too stunned to move. The demon, a big green thing looking somewhat like an ape crossed with a bulldog, held the whip that it had just used to drive the child up to a higher branch; Jin could see the dark bloodstains on the limb just below where the child lay now. Yet, for all that was clearly happening, the two seemed like old friends. The child was not upset, not crying, and the demon, for all his ugliness and the whip in his hand, sounded like someone's indulgent grandfather. The strangeness of the scene held Jin in horrid fascination even though her every impulse was to rush forward, dash the demon against a convenient rock, and rescue the poor child. Wasn't that what she was there for?

"I'll try," the little girl said. "You might need to whip me again."

"I don't think I can," the demon said.

"I must climb this tree," the little girl said. "Please help me."

Jin could barely believe what she was hearing, and she could not reconcile it at all with what she saw. The demon raised the whip again and snapped it expertly at the girl's battered legs, raising an angry red welt across her foot. The child winced and reached for the next branch. That was as far as she got. Her bloodied hand lost its grip as she overextended, trying to go higher. She fell.

The demon rushed forward as if he meant to catch her, but he was too far away, as was Jin, who finally shook off her immobility and ran to the base of the tree. She found the demon kneeling beside the still form. It glanced at Jin, but that was all. Its attention was on the girl.

"I'm sorry," the girl said, her voice barely above a whisper. "I tried."

"It's all right," the demon said. "You can try again when you're feeling better."

"I think..." she began, and that was all.

Jin fervently hoped with every ounce of her being that the child had merely fainted. "Get out of the way if you're not going to do something!" she said, but the demon didn't even look at her.

"Very little one can do at this point," the demon said. "She's dead."

I'm...too late
? Jin drew back to strike the demon, but her arm froze in mid-blow: the demon was very carefully picking up the tiny body to cradle it tenderly in its arms. Then he slowly stood up and very carefully bore his burden along a well-worn path. After a moment Jin lowered her fist and followed him.

"If you've come to help me with my duties," the demon said over his shoulder, "it's really not necessary. As you can see, I can manage my tortures very well."

It was only when they had gone just a little further Jin began to realize just how long the demon had been managing. The valley floor beyond the one torture tree was littered with cairns of stone, several hundred of them, and Jin knew it didn't take the sharpest knife in the drawer to realize that they were graves. The demon lay the child's body on an empty patch of sand and started gathering stones. Jin watched him as he worked.

"Who is in all the other graves?" Jin asked, furious. "Where they all children, just like her? Is that your specialty?"

"Of course they were just like her," the demon said calmly. "They
were
her."

Jin didn't know what to say. The thought that the poor child had been tortured to death in the same hell by the same demon for incarnations almost past counting was almost more than she could bear. If only she had gotten there sooner! If only she hadn't stopped to look at that stupid garden. She still didn't know why it was there or who made it, but it seemed so pointless now, compared to her horrible failure, and the reality of what had just happened there and, apparently, was going to happen again.

"I'll stop it next time," Jin said. "Count on that."

"I don't think that's within your power, but please do try."

The demon finished his work and now there was one more grave among all the others. It dusted off its hands like any other workman after a job well done and then started back down the path. This time the demon paused when it passed Jin, and stared at her with some curiosity. "You are an odd one. I'd think a Demon Lord of your obvious stature would have more pressing matters than watching one poor demon at his infinite work. Didn't I torture her well enough?"