Edgefast wasn’t, really. He couldn’t be, not with the business end of Brompton’s spear jammed up one nostril.

“ ’Es bine,” he said. “Mub bedder, dan gew.”

Brompton withdrew the spear and went back to leaning on it and staring glumly over the blasted landscape of Hell.

“Sorry,” he said. “Trouble at home.”

“Mrs. Brompton?” said Edgefast.

Brompton and Mrs. Brompton had a difficult marriage. There were fatal diseases that had better relationships with their victims than Brompton had with Mrs. Brompton.

“Yeah.”

“She move out again?”

“No, she moved back in.”

“Oh.”

There was silence for a time.

“I thought you were going to leave her,” said Edgefast.

“I did.”

“What happened?”

“She came with me.”

“Oh,” said Edgefast for a second time. There wasn’t much else to say. Brompton always seemed to be unhappy with Mrs. Brompton. The trouble was, he was even unhappier without Mrs. Brompton.

“She’d be lost without you, you know,” said Edgefast.

“Nah, I tried that,” said Brompton. “She found her way back.”

“Oh,” said Edgefast, for the third time, followed by “Oh?” and then “Oh-oh!”

Crudford manifested himself directly in front of the two guards with a sound like a plate of jelly being dropped on a stone floor. He raised his hat with his left hand and said, “Evening, gentlemen.” Under his right arm he carried a jar, and in the jar a mass of blue atoms seethed and roiled, slowly forming something that became, as he drew closer to Edgefast, a single hostile eye surrounded by pale, bruised skin. The eye seemed to glare at Edgefast, who would have taken a step back if it hadn’t been for his shortcomings in the leg department. Edgefast had clear memories of that eye. It had looked at him in a similar way just moments before some very sharp bits of the body to which it was then attached had ripped him apart.

Crudford put his hat back on his head, and patted the jar the way one might pat the comfortable carrying case of a beloved pet.

“Here we are, ma’am,” he said. “It’s nice to be back, isn’t it?”

• • •

The Great Malevolence, the monstrous fount of all evil, sat in its lair of fire and stone at the heart of the Mountain of Despair, the flames reflected in its eyes so that it seemed almost to be burning from within. It had cast aside its armor for now, and set aside its shield of skulls and its burning spear. The great crown of bone that grew from its head glowed red from the heat of the infernos that surrounded it. Its monstrous body, scarred and misshapen, lay slumped on its throne.

The throne was a massive construct of bones that twisted and tangled like pale branches and yellowed vines. There was no comfort to the throne, but that was as the Great Malevolence preferred: it never wanted to grow used to its banishment in Hell, and never wished to find a moment’s peace there. It had come into existence milliseconds after the birth of the Multiverse, a force for destruction born out of the creation of worlds. It could, it supposed, have become an agent for good, but it was a jealous being, an angry being, and it had fought against all that was fine and noble in the Multiverse until at last a force greater than itself had grown tired of its evil. The Great Malevolence was cast down to Hell for eternity, and it had conspired to free itself ever since. It had almost succeeded, too, but its plans had been ruined by the boy named Samuel Johnson and his dog, Boswell.