"... Never used to be that way in the old days. Live people stayed live and dead people stayed dead. You look at my wife now!-" and the ferryman bounced the skeleton against him. It rattled like an armful of castanets. "Wha'd'ye think of her?"

Siveni opened her mouth, and closed it. Mriga opened her mouth, and considered, and said, "I've never met anyone like her."

The ferryman's face softened a little, fangs and all. "There, then, you're a right-spoken young lady, even though you do be a goddess. Some people, they come up here and try to get in this boat, and they say the most frightful rude things about my wife."

"The nerve," Siveni said.

"True for you, young goddess," said the ferryman, "and that's it for them as says such things, for they're always hungry, as I say." He glanced at the water. "Never you mind, then, you just put your pretty selves in the boat, you and your friend, and give me your hard money. She don't really care what goes on out here, just so you be nice and don't tear things up, you hear? Speak her fair, that's the way. They do say she's a soft heart for a pretty face, remembering how she came to be down here; though we don't talk about that in front of her, if you take my meaning. In you get. Is that all of you?"

"One moment," Mriga said, and whistled for Tyr; then, when there was no answer, again. Tyr appeared after a moment, her gold piece still held in her teeth, and trotted to the boat, whining at it softly as it bobbed in the water. "Come on, Tyr," she said. "We have to go across. He's on the other side."

Tyr whined again, looking distrustfully at the boat, and finally jumped in.

"The little dog too?" said the ferryman. "Dogs go for half fare."

Tyr stood on her hind legs to give the ferryman the coin, then sat down on the boat's middle seat, grinning, and barked, thumping her tail on the gunwale.

"Why, thank you, missy, that's a kindness and so I shall," said the ferryman, hastily pocketing the second half of Tyr's coin, which he had bitten in two. "They don't overpay us down here, and times are hard all over, eh? It's much appreciated. Don't put your hands in the water, ladies. Anyone else? No? Cheap lot they must be up there these days. Off we go, then."

And off they went, leaving behind the sad, pushing crowd on the bank. Mriga sat by the gunwale with one arm around Tyr, who slurped her once, absently, and sat staring back the way they'd come, or looking suspiciously at the water. The air grew colder. Shuddering, Mriga glanced first at Siveni, who sat looking across the wide river at the far bank; then at Ischade. The necromant was gazing thoughtfully into the water. Mriga looked over the side, and saw no reflection ... at first. After a little while she averted her eyes. But Ischade did not raise her head until the boat grounded again; and when she looked up, some of that eternal assurance was missing from her eyes.

"There are the gates," the ferryman said. "I'll be leaving you here. Watch your step, the ground's much broken. And a word, ladies, by your leave: watch yourselves in there. So many go in and don't come out again."

Looking at the dark town crouching behind brazen gates, Mriga could believe it. Hell looked a great deal like Sanctuary.

One by one they got out of the boat and started up the slope. Siveni was last out, and so busy looking up at the rocky ground that she missed what was right under her feet. She lost her footing and almost fell, just managing to catch herself with her spear. "Hell," she said, a bitter joke: The spear spat lightnings.

The ferryman, watching her, frowned slightly. "We don't call it that here," he said. "Do we now, love?"

The bones rattled slightly. "Ah well. Off we go then...." And they were alone on the far shore.

The gates were exactly like those of the Triumph Gate not far from the Governor's Palace, but where those were iron, these were brazen, and locked and mightily barred. The four stood together, hearing more strongly than they had yet the sounds of lamentation from inside. It was beginning to sound less threatening, the way a horrible smell becomes less horrible with exposure. "Well," Siveni said, "what now? Is there some spell we need?"

Ischade shook her head, looking mildly surprised. "I don't normally use this route," she said. "And the few times I've bothered, hell's gates have been open. Very odd indeed. Someone has been making changes ..."

"Someone who's expecting us, I'll wager," Siveni said. "Allow me." She lifted up the spear, leaned back with it like a javelin-thrower, and threw it at the gates. For that moment, lightning turned everything livid and froze everything still. Thunder drowned out the cries of the damned inside. Then came a few seconds of violet afterimages and ears ringing; then the darkness, in which by the tamer light of Siveni's spearhead they could see hell gates lying twisted and shattered on the paving. Siveni picked up her spear, then swept through the opening and past the wreckage, looking most satisfied.

"She does that rather well," Ischade said as she and Mriga and Tyr followed after.

"Yes, she always has been good at tearing things up," Mriga said. She looked over her shoulder at the gates and willed them back in place, as she'd done earlier with Ischade's wards. To her great distress, they didn't reappear.

"We're on other gods' ground now," Ischade said as they turned away from the gates, moving past the shadows of empty animal pens and around the spur of the great wall that sheltered the Bazaar. "Nearly all powers but theirs will be muted here, I fear. If your otherself tries that stunt again inside, I suspect she'll be in for a surprise, for she was still outside hell while she did it this time."

Mriga nodded as they made their way through the streets that led to the Bazaar. Almost everything was as it should be-the trash, the stink, the garbage in the gutters, the crowds. But the dark shapes moving there had a look about them of not caring where they were-an upsetting contrast to those stranded on the far side of the river, who seemed to know quite well. Looking across the city for evidence of hellfire, Mriga found nothing but the same scattered plumes of smoke and the smouldering reek that prevailed in the Sanctuary of the daylit world. Yet the overhanging clouds were underlit as if with many fires.

As they walked further, Mriga got a chance to see why, and came to understand that there was a difference here between the dead and the damned. Many of the dark people going by carried their own hellfires with them- bright conflagrations of rage, coal-red frustrations, banked and bitter, the hot light sucking darknesses that were envy and greed, the blinding fire-shot smokes of lust and hunger for power that fed and fed and were never consumed. Some few of the passersby bore evidence of old burning, now long gone. They were burnt-out cinders, merely existing, neither living nor dead. But worst of all, to Mriga's thought, were those many, many dead who had never even lived enough to burn a little, who had given up both sin and passion as useless. They walked dully past the flaming damned, and past goddesses, and neither hellfire nor the cold clean light of Siveni's spear found anything in their eyes at all.

She soon enough found worse. There were places that seemed damned as surely as people; spots where murders or betrayals had taken place, and where they took place again and again, endlessly, the original participants dragging the passing dead in to re-enact the old horrors. Some shapes walking there were less dark than others, but wore their torments differently-serpents growing from their flesh and gnawing at it; animal heads on human bodies, or vice versa; limbs that went gangrenous, rotted, fell off, regrew, while their owners walked about with placid looks that said nothing was wrong, nothing at all-