With a final seizure and a creak like a nail being dragged out of a hardwood coffin, the lifter ground to a halt. Doors hissed open in a puff of steam. The rest of the passengers, now somewhere close to two dozen, all tightly pressed together except in my bloody part of the car, shuffled out. I was terrified the door might close on me and the lifter drag me back down again, so I didn’t even try to rise but simply scrambled out on elbows and knees, doing my best to keep my bloody stump from touching anything. The shock was beginning to wear off and the pain was incredible, as if the raw end had been plunged into a bag of salt. Believe me, they may not let you die in Hell, but they’re quite happy to let you suffer to the extent of your capacities and beyond.

The Terminus was immense. You could have plugged a couple of Grand Central Stations into just the lifter station, but it was also the hub of a network of pedestrian tunnels, roads, and (as I discovered to my surprise) railways. The trains fanned out from the central terminus, and as I staggered up the stairs I could see some of them waiting on their tracks—long, low things like millipedes, dull black metal with windows so narrow they might have been gun slits and probably were. I had no time to marvel, though, because every second I was staggering lost in Pandaemonium was a second I was vulnerable to being grabbed by one of the roaming bands of thieves and kidnappers or picked up by the Purified, the elite Mastema guardians of Hell and the only creatures who owed allegiance to the Adversary above all his lesser supporters. Still, although the Purified might not dance to the music of Eligor and Prince Sitri and the other bigwigs, they would definitely agree that Bobby Dollar was persona non grata in Hell, and my express ride back to the Punishment Levels would have me under torture as quickly as if Grand Duke Eligor personally caught me in his bedroom.

The Purified were uniformed in semi-modern military gear the color of thunderheads, each one wearing a sort of black spiral on the tunic, like the view from on top of a tornado, perhaps an image of the metaphorical Pit we were all in. This somber gray and black motif was made cheerier by splatters of deep crimson, apparently individual to each soldier. In their bulky metal gear and the strange casque helmets that hid their faces, the Purified could have resembled a Victorian writer’s idea of astronauts but for their distorted bodies, which had only “big and strong” in common, along with the astounding variety of weapons they carried, including the first guns I’d seen in Hell.