Lastlight

You hear it first in your sleep.

Not a word, at first. A sound like a coal settling in a grate, low and warm, somewhere under the floor. Night after night it comes back, and night after night it is nearer, until one night it has words.

It is empty, it says. Come down.

You do not know what is empty. You know where down is. Everyone does.

You go to the graveyard after dark, because that is where the voice is loudest. You stand on a fresh grave, and the earth gives under your feet the way it gives for the dead and for no one else, and you walk down into it.

The dead go down this road lying still, with a coin on the tongue. You go down it on your feet, breathing, with nothing in your mouth at all. The earth does not stop you. Nothing below has ever had to.

The city of the living

At the bottom of the graves the dark opens out, and there is a city in it.

It is built from what the dead leave at the gate: coffin boards, headstones laid flat for paving, grave-goods nailed up for shutters, candles by the thousand standing in their own wax. It is called Lastlight. It is the last place lit by living hands before the road goes down into Hell, and everyone in it came down the way you did.

Nobody asks your name. Before your first night is out you learn why. Down here, names are how things are counted, and whatever is counted belongs to Hell.

What the living say

They tell you what the voice meant.

At the bottom of Hell there is a throne of bone and tarnished gold, and no one sits on it. Whoever sits it rules Hell. Nothing Hell has counted can take the seat: not the dead, not the demons, not the princes who have wanted it since before the world was old. The living are not counted. That is the only reason any of you came.

They tell you the rest as plainly. Die down there, and you are counted like everything else. Then you are one more of the dead, and the seat is closed to you for good.

No one in Lastlight knows how the throne came to be empty. Something deeper down does, they say.

The one of you who has gone deepest is called the Hellruler. It is not a crown. It is the name for whoever stands nearest the seat, and it changes hands whenever someone goes further down than the last. There has only ever been one Hellruler who sat, and no one in Lastlight will say his name.

The six braziers

In the middle of the city is a plaza, and on the plaza stand six braziers of black iron.

Five hold the fires of princes of Hell. Gaap the Carrier, who moves the dead between the circles. Amon, Marquis of Wrath. Mammon, Prince of Greed, who owns more than all the others together. Moloch the Devourer, who takes his tithe from everything. Paimon the Teacher, who knows every art there is.

Each of them wants the throne. None can take it, because each of them is counted. So each backs the living. Feed a prince's fire and the prince lends you what it has: its speed, its wrath, its plunder, its tithe, its knowledge. Nothing a prince lends is free. None of them has said yet what it will be owed.

The sixth brazier burns violet, low and steady, and there is no name on it. The ones who have been in Lastlight longest do not go near it.

You stand in front of it for a long time. It sounds like a coal settling in a grate.

The Anvil and the fare

Everything the dead carry down is made of the dead. A blade from the graves holds a little of whoever last held it. At the Anvil in Lastlight the living break that gear down, and what is left is soul: the one coin Hell has always paid in, and never run short of.

The dead owe the Ferryman a coin each for the crossing, laid on the tongue before burial. That coin is an obol. You are not dead, and you owe him nothing, so every obol you find is yours to spend. The Ferryman knows it. You will meet him on the river.

Beside the Anvil there is a hall where the living swear to one another, and past it an arena where they settle, blade to blade, who stands nearer the front of the line. Everyone in Lastlight wants the same seat. They trade with each other and swear to each other, and each of them would take it alone.

The Pit

In a corner of the city, apart from everything else, there is a hole in the ground with a low wall around it. They call it the Pit.

Under the floor of Hell lies everything Hell has ever buried, and it used to stay buried. Now it listens. Every depth one of the living clears is a footstep it hears, and when enough footsteps have fallen, the Pit fills, and one of the buried climbs out into Lastlight.

When that happens the whole city goes to meet it, because it came for all of them.

The road down

On the far side of the city the paving stops, and the road goes on down into the dark: a long field of fresh graves, lit by candles that gutter and never go out. The dead are walking it, slowly, all in one direction, the way they have walked since the first of them was buried.

You take the road. The dead turn their heads as you pass.

They do not like to be passed by someone breathing.