According to Lameh’s briefing, facts now stuck in my brain like some kind of half-forgotten college survey course, Hell is a monstrous cylinder, wide as a small country and almost infinitely high and low, its countless habitations piled in layers like some impossibly huge core sample, the pith of an entire world. Abaddon, like much of Hell, was a sort of self-contained country made up of several levels, and its cities were built almost entirely from the wreckage of other cities.

“Wreckage” sure seemed to describe what lay before me. Stones and mud had been dragged into new arrangements, the rubble of old towers and walls rebuilt into a thousand new shapes to make an immense insect hive with scarcely two shoulders’ width of passageway between the stacked structures, and every bit I could see teemed with hellish life. The variety of body shapes was astonishing. Some of them could hardly be called bodies in a normal sense, being little more than moving piles of goo (often disconcertingly full of eyes); others wore the shapes of beasts or half-beasts, or upsetting reworkings of the basic human form. One of them a short distance away from me, crawling up a muddy facade of linked and interconnected holes over flimsy ladders of wood and mud and twisted rawhide, looked like one of those giant Japanese crabs with incredibly long legs, except each of this creature’s legs had a row of human hands growing down its length. The head perched on top of the crab shell was human, too, and looked as if it was whistling a tune.

But now I noticed something even stranger than that. Just a few yards behind me in the mist lay the near end of the Neronian Bridge, a path that led both in and out of Hell, but nobody on the Hell side seemed to realize the bridge was there. I watched people walk into the mist and go right past the end of the bridge as if it were invisible. Maybe it was, for them. All those people stumbling around in misery only yards from a way out that they couldn’t see. Suddenly, I felt sick. If I had not yet truly realized where I was and how bad it was going to be, I began to grasp it then.

There was no sky, of course. The makers of Hell hadn’t needed to bow to physical reality any more than the folk who built Heaven, and the very shape of the place was meant to be a constant reminder of confinement and punishment. Parts of Abaddon, however, did stretch very high above me, especially along the walls where crude materials were scaffolded upward many times the height of a man; but above it all was a great roof of jagged, pitted rock. We looked up at the bottom of the level above us, not at sky.