The wooden door collapsed in upon itself. The face of the Shadows opened its mouth in a soundless cry of frustration and rage, and then was gone. The divisions between the dimensions of the Multiverse were slowly concealed, falling upon one another like clear sheets of plastic dotted with stars until at last there was only one familiar set of constellations in the sky, and then even that was gone as the floors and ceilings and walls of Wreckit & Sons became visible once more. Samuel and the others were left standing beside the ruins of the grotto, and there was silence but for the beating of Mrs. Abernathy’s heart.

“Don’t go anywhere,” said Crudford. “I won’t be a—”

And then he, and the heart, vanished.

XXXVII

In Which Mrs. Abernathy Finally Gets Her Just Deserts

A GREAT HOST HAD GATHERED by the shores of Lake Cocytus, in the chilliest, bleakest region of Hell. Jagged peaks towered above the lake, casting their shadows across its frozen surface. Nothing dwelt among their crevasses and caves: even the hardiest of demons shunned Cocytus. A bitter, howling wind blew ceaselessly across the lake’s white plain, the only barriers to its progress being the bodies of those not fully submerged beneath the ice.

Cocytus was both a lake and a river, one of five that encircled Hell, the others being the Styx, the Phlegethon, the Acheron, and the Lethe. But Cocytus was the deepest and, where it entered the Range of Desolation, the widest. It was there that the Great Malevolence imprisoned those who had betrayed it. The lake had four sections, each deeper than the next: those guilty of only minor betrayals were permitted to keep their upper bodies and arms above the surface; those in the second level were trapped up to their necks; those in the third were surrounded by ice, yet a little light still penetrated to where they lay; but the worst were imprisoned in the darkest depths of the lake, where there was no light, and no hope.

The Great Malevolence itself had once been a prisoner of the lake, placed there by a power much greater than its own, but it had been freed by a demon that had melted the ice with cauldrons of molten lava. Each load of lava would melt only an inch of ice, and before the next cauldron could be brought, most of the ice would have returned again, so that every cauldron made only the tiniest fraction of difference. Yet still the demon filled its cauldron and carried it to the lake, working without rest for millennia, until finally the ice was weak and low enough for the Great Malevolence to escape.

That demon was Ba’al, later to mutate into Mrs. Abernathy.

The Great Malevolence was not a being familiar with sadness or regret. It was too selfish, too wrapped up in its own pain. But Mrs. Abernathy’s betrayal had hurt it more than it had ever been hurt before. Now it was forced to condemn to the lake the demon that had once saved it from this same ice. Had there been even one atom of mercy in the Great Malevolence, it might have found some way to forgive Mrs. Abernathy, or make her punishment less severe, as a reward for her help in times past.