Yasmin's grip on my arm tightened. I'd have to talk to her about clipping her fingernails.

Five minutes later, the boatman's skiff was beached on shore, open to the inspection of every fiend with artistic aspirations. The starboard side of the bow was painted much like the skiff we'd seen before: with a profusion of faces from many sentient species, all of them clouded by a profound sadness. None of these people wept openly, or even seemed close to tears; instead, they wore the dull expression of long-term grief, too wearily dispirited to cry. I had to admire the technique of the painter – each face, rendered in muted browns, had a clinical accuracy I found uncanny.

Unlike the painted starboard side, the port side of the bow was completely undecorated: bare wood, simply sanded smooth. The planks looked freshly cut and trimmed; and as I ran my fingers along the wood's surface, the boatman stepped up to my side. «You will notice this is newly repaired,» he said in his rasping voice. «My boat suffered damage after… a financial disagreement with some passengers.»

I made a sympathetic noise. «Customers can be so hard to please.»

«Indeed. They had quite a falling out.» He smiled. His teeth were yellow, with dark brown stains that gave me cause for unpleasant speculation. «Now that my boat has been refurbished,» he went on, «I wish to restore the usual… embellishments.» He turned to the crowd of umbrals. «Your fame as artists has spread the length of the river. I would be pleased to pay a reasonable commission to anyone who could copy the images from the starboard onto the port.»

A chorus of murmurs rustled through the assembly. Every bat-like wing trembled with dark shivers. «Copy?» several voices whispered. «Copy?»

«Yes,» the boatman replied. «These faces are my personal insignia. I must have them painted on both sides of the bow so that I am recognized by my… clients.»

«Copy?» the whispers continued. «Copy facesssss…»

«Surely this is not a difficult assignment?» the boatman said. «I've brought the necessary paints, and even a few brushes.»

«Not facessss,» said a nearby fiend. «Maybe nice mandala with sssstar motif?»

«Yessss,» agreed another, «or Cosssmic Egg with wreath of ssstylized sssnakesss?»

«Ssscythes,» chirped up a third, «I sssee ssstunning asssemblage of peach-toned ssscythes, sssuperimposed on mauve medicine wheelsss, sssurrounded by cressscent moonsss and dolphinsss.»

«Dolphins?» the boatman shuddered.

«Ssscarlet onesss. Very pudgy, with lightning boltsss coming out of tailsss.»

The boatman made a strangled sound. «I do not want scarlet dolphins, whether or not they come equipped with anal lightning bolts…»

«Isss sssymbol,» an umbral put in quickly. «Dolphinsss sssymbolize river Ssstyx.»

«There are no dolphins in the Styx!» the boatman snapped. «There are only unpleasant creatures called hydroloths, and they would rip a sissy little dolphin to fillets just for the fun of hearing it squeak.»

One fiend cocked its head to the side. «Hydrolothsss look good with lightning boltssss?»

«A hydroloth wouldn't look good if you put a bag over its head, and one over yours while you're at it. I do not want hydroloths; I do not want stylized snakes; I do not want a nice mandala. I want an exact copy of the faces that are already on the other side of the boat, all right? Do you think you can handle that?»

The umbrals bristled with artistic indignation and stormed away, stomping louder than you'd think shadows could manage.

Yasmin stepped forward and tapped the boatman on the shoulder. «Sir,» she said above the noise of the fiends' departure, «you don't need an artist; you need a hack. Let me introduce the most unrepentant hack in the multiverse…»

I tried my best to look modest.

In the next few minutes, I learned several things: that the skeletal boat people who ply the Styx call themselves marraenoloths; that marraenoloths are the only creatures who have learned the secret of navigating the river's black waters; and that this particular marraenoloth was a haughty berk named Garou, who refused to admit how lucky he was to find the one village in Carceri with a painter who would (a) take his commission and (b) not charge an arm and a soul for it.

«There is no element of luck involved,» Garou insisted. «I simply concentrated on my need for a suitable artist, and the Styx carried me here. You could have been anywhere on the Lower Planes and the river would have brought me to you… or to someone else equally talented and perhaps less imbued with that foul-smelling dust.»

I was going to snap back a caustic reply, but stopped myself before the words came out. Instead, I asked, «Can you really smell the dust on me?»

«Most certainly,» Garou replied. «And let me add that in my day, I have inhaled the stench of rotting corpses, the reek of embalming chemicals, the odors of a thousand types of river pollution… but never have I smelled such a disgusting aroma as that which arises from the dust in your garments.» He leaned toward me, thrust his gaping nasal cavity against my jacket, and drew in a heady breath. «Ah yes,» he sighed with pleasure, «totally, putridly repugnant.»

Yasmin's jaw tightened and she let out her breath slowly. «You're a Sensate, aren't you, Garou?»

«I have the good judgment to belong to the Society of Sensation, yes. Is there something wrong with that?»

«No, no,» she answered, a fatalistic tone in her voice. «Britlin, shouldn't you give him the secret handshake or something?»

«Handshake?» I snorted. «The formal Sensate greeting is rather more tactile than a mere handshake.»

«Indeed,» Garou said. «It requires a hundred and twenty-seven meticulously prepared props, takes a day and a half to perform, and may only be conducted under the auspices of a qualified chirurgeon.»

«I've done it twice,» I told Yasmin. «Remember that scar I showed you last night? The sodding duck moved at precisely the wrong time.»

«You too?» Garou asked with something close to sympathy in his voice. «I now make a point of ramming ducks with my skiff whenever they cross my path. Of course, all marraenoloths like to ram ducks – it's one of our little traditions. But for me, it has personal meaning.»

«Yes? Then clobber one for me sometime,» I said.

And if there is such a thing as friendship between humans and creatures of evil, that was the start between me and Garou.

We negotiated a simple deal: I'd paint Garou's boat, and he'd ship us out of the village before the umbrals had a chance to butcher us. The Styx flows through all the Lower Planes, offering access to every form of hell imaginable; but it also passes close to a number of portals, and Garou promised he could take us to gates that led to relative safety. Nothing so convenient as a route directly to Sigil, alas – the best Garou could offer were portals to the so-called gate-towns, outposts which serve as staging points between the Lower Planes and the neutral Outlands. From the stories my father told, I knew the gate-towns to the Lower Planes were vicious places in their own right, tainted by evil seeping up from below… but as long as they retained some vestige of neutrality, any gate-town would be less lethal than where we were now. In a gate-town, we could contact the local chapters of our factions and get help. After that, we could worry about our next move.

Soon I had a paintbrush in hand, and was roughing out the sorrow-filled faces I would have to copy. There were sixteen of the portraits, a day's work at most: by the time the umbrals retired to their huts for the night, I'd be finished. Garou assured us he could slip our party out of town quietly while the fiends slept.

«Can we trust him?» Yasmin whispered to me as I started to paint the grief-ravaged face of a high elf.