I was in a neighborhood that I had passed through before, cramped streets between slumping mud-brick dwellings, a place full of misshapen, shuffling figures, where every breath was full of red dust, and the sounds of violence and suffering never stopped. But Abaddon was the first layer above the Punishment Levels, which made it a place of freedom—at least in comparison with what lay below, starting with the Suicide Forest and getting worse and then even worse and then unimaginably worse the lower down you went. The creatures here in Abaddon were suffering because they were in Hell, but they weren’t being actively tortured. These were the creatures the nobility of Hell shanghaied to use as slaves, the workers who performed Hell’s most disgusting labors, and served as cannon fodder (sometimes literally!) in Hell’s armies. They would have been the lowest of the low in all the universe, except for one thing—they still clung to a tiny bit of freedom, still made lives for themselves in the midst of horror. Some of them, like Riprash, even thought there might be something more for them someday, and dreamed impossible dreams of an end to torment—dreamed, perhaps, of an eventual taste of kindness. The things living here weren’t just damned monsters, they were also human souls.

Just when I was in danger of turning maudlin, I heard a horn echoing from the stony walls, along with the distant but still unpleasantly clear baying of hellhounds. The commissar and his men must have retreated when they saw what I’d done and hurried back to the station to climb up to Abaddon in a lifter. Which meant my feelings of relief were bullshit: they were close enough to catch me long before I reached the bridge. Time to run again.

My head felt like a smashed melon, and I could have sworn I was on my last legs. In any other circumstance I would have been, but I didn’t have the luxury of collapsing. I tried to recall every single thing Gob had shown me, every trick for getting quickly across Abaddon. I went right through the houses of the damned, I leaped from rooftop to rooftop like a comic book character—well, like an extremely tired, mostly one-handed comic book character—and took every shortcut I could remember, including one where I skittered down a crumbling wall with an immense, fire-belching pit beneath me instead of just the distant ground. Through luck and taking a few crazy chances, I managed to put enough distance between myself and my pursuers that the cries of the hellhounds grew faint, but I knew it wouldn’t last.

I finally reached a spot where the streets ended and the dark, empty outer passages began. I had no lantern, but I had been a long time in these lower reaches, and my demon eyes served me well.