I passed buildings that looked like factories, the sort of hellish mills that even William Blake probably couldn’t have imagined. Some streamed blood-colored sewage, and the doorways were littered with burned and mangled bodies of what were probably accident-prone employees, many of them scraping at the iron factory doors to get back in, despite their horrible wounds. I heard the clang of huge machines and watched smoke and steam belching from furnace chimneys. I couldn’t help noticing that things on this level had advanced from the medieval tech of Abaddon to something a bit more eighteenth century, steam and infernal machines dwelling happily alongside plague and utter poverty.

The closer I got to the lifter shaft, the more awesome the structure became. Like a skyscraper, the stone cylinder was nearly as big around as a city block, but that was nothing compared to how high it stretched upward before its length vanished in the upper darkness. I couldn’t imagine how something so tall supported its own weight without guy wires or buttresses. It was an engineering feat that would have made any pharaoh proud.

The lifter stood in the middle of a busy town square, an open plaza like the kind you sometimes see around the big cathedrals in Europe. As I approached, more cautiously now, a few people wandered out of the archways at the bottom of the shaft. The crowds in the square here seemed all but oblivious to Niloch’s burning citadel, going on with their public business of theft, gambling, fornication, and various other pastimes. I was in an area where someone in a hurry drew no attention at all, except for the usual swarm of pickpockets, rapists, and knife-wielding psychopaths that hang around anywhere people arrive and depart. If I had slowed down I’m sure they would have begun to move in on me, but as it was I must have looked like too much work.