One last dizzy thought as I stumbled across the main concourse through a crush of Red Citizens as thick as anything I’d found in Abaddon: So was this the level of technology in Pandaemonium? Why? Why did this place look like a fairly modern railway station while down in Abaddon even the comparatively well-off were living like medieval peasants?

Stuff like that tends to snag my interest, but I couldn’t get distracted. I was woozy, exhausted, and sick, and if I didn’t find the way out I’d attract notice from the armored Purified, who seemed to have little else to do but to stare out their eyeslits at everything and everyone that passed. I found a huge stairway that, in my condition, might as well have been Mt. Everest, but it seemed to lead up toward an area of greater light, or perhaps an even bigger concourse, so I tightened the rag around my wrist again and started up.

It took me what felt like half an hour or more to climb those hundreds of steps. I was pushed and bumped the whole way by flocks of grotesque commuters who shoved me whenever I got in their way, but at last I reached another lobby. It was smaller than the great concourse downstairs, but its monstrously tall and narrow windows glowed with bright red light, and I could see a door that looked open to the outside.

As the uncaring, often actively hostile crowd jostled me out of the terminus and into what I realized must be Dis Pater Square, I saw the heart of the great infernal city for the first time. Pandaemonium was built from what looked like only two kinds of stone, great blocks of volcanic black and something more translucent, almost like quartz, that glowed with a fiery scarlet light. The radiance from the great buildings in its center made the whole metropolis seem to burn like a coal. Add the surrounding black city walls and, from a distance, Pandaemonium looked like a pile of embers burning forever in the darkness. The Red City. It wasn’t that different from other Hell cities I’d seen, just bigger and more so. The sky above my head was a tangle: dozens upon dozens of skyscraper towers loomed crookedly against the darkness, linked to each other by an array of fragile bridges, as if someone had stuck a bunch of giant pickup sticks in the ground, point down, and then dumped another pile right on top to let them settle where they would. Just looking up at this helter-skelter made me lightheaded without taking away a single throb from my wounded arm.