They moved too quickly for me to make out each type, but I felt a twinge in my guts that told me they were the same. Mouths that opened like flowers, lined with venom spewing teeth, legs as long and fine as hair that wrapped around our steeds and held them under powerful proboscises that punched through our windscreens, beaks that housed bouquets of labrums and other foul appendages that extracted riders from their horses, and as we were brought in, many of our pegasi were cast aside; threadbare dolls no longer wanted by children turned grim by the brutal world they lived in, now alone, having seen the worst of what Tarthas can do, orphaned by profane acts of hunger.

Perhaps I could have turned Northwind aside, or fired my weapons at the exposed exhaust port as we planned, but though I could see, I was blinded by fear and grief, seeing Sundance and Harbinger ripped in half.

I could only feel something of what happened to Northwind and I. We were taken in a powerful grip and spun around, and then a fluid began to seep through the windscreen, turning to vapor as it dripped onto me. I woke slowly in a dark room, held down by a pointed thing, hearing a squelching sound punctuated by a tearful whimper. When the sound stopped, the pointed thing moved, and I lay there still to get my bearings.

I had not been killed. In fact, I was untouched. I felt my chest, and could tell my armor had been scratched a little, as my tabard was partly shredded, but there was no pain in my skin or dryness of trickled blood beneath my arming clothes. I then put my hands at my sides and reached out slowly with each of my pinky fingers. On the right I felt a soft membrane, on the left I felt something bulbous that moved suddenly when I touched it. I lay corpse still as soon as I'd slowly withdrawn my fingers wishing I could somehow keep the smell of the place out of my nostrils. When I dared to turn my head, I looked into an eye, pale and strange, and it looked back at me, telling me it knew all along I was there, but did not care. So I stood, one inch and a time, after rolling over so that I could push myself with my hands and be ready to act once arisen.

The air was cobweb. There was a valley of soft tissue, like those subcutaneous layers that punish us when exposed to air. On either side of the valley were various mounds, and the scant light I could see by came from a leaf-shaped orb at the far end of whatever room I was in. The light coming from it seemed to be generated by a fluid that constantly drained and refilled, and would slowly pulse between a sallow green to a milky orange. The mounds writhed, or slid more like, sometimes enough for the topmost components to roll down. These were rarely whole bodies. I did not want to see this room in any sort of detail, so I stepped, quickly as I could, over the wet and sticky floor, often shaking my boot free of some ooze, trying to blot from my mind the occasional glimpses of a face frozen in mournful realization. There are many ways to die, but I doubt I've seen any worse than this.

The room was in fact four narrow chambers connected by claustrophobic hallways, and at the end I came close to the far away light; a thorax filled with phosphorus bile. I learned this when the creature turned to look at me. I stood still, remembering a time when I was a boy and allowed a centipede to crawl over my naked body, and I summoned that same childish curiosity of the bizarre and threatening so that I might not disturb this heinous creature while it explored me with its feelers. Never have I been more thankful of my armor, as I did not wish to know how this beast's probing members felt against my skin, and while I worried my hood might tighten around a feeler, agitating the creature, it did not. I stood as still as the dessicated bodies piled in heaps about the four rooms, and waited patiently with enough engineered fascination to not grow weary. When the monster was done, I stepped back and looked for an egress.

There was no door anywhere in the room, and I worried that I might have been near it at the onset, and was drawn in the wrong direction by the appearance of light, as if I had falsely associated the presence of light with liberation. It was an odd time to feel dread over my entire existence, and to call into question the tenets that my earliest incarnations indelled in those of us who followed, but I needed to remind myself of the sublime tranquility I experienced when in the presence of the Sun to remember that there is light that can be trusted. In a world where all is kept hidden behind shadows, there are surely tainted sources of light, but the blame for one being led astray by a false hope is not to be placed on the hopefulness of those deprived of truth, rather it is placed on those who cast the unhealthy shadows, disguising that which is foul as that which is fine.

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There was nothing fine in Pandemonium, and the disguises were only effective because of the madness secreting from its many orifices. I probed through the muck in my mad search for escape, lifting things with my foot that I dare not describe, and daring my truesight only to find myself lifting my hood before purging my guts with violence. One good thing was yielded by my search; I found my spear. There was a length of cleanish fabric on one long dead human. I cut the fabric and used it to clean my weapon; an odd thing to do, considering my locale, and that I then used my spear as a tool to move things I did not care to touch. I prodded the ground for any depressions that might hint at a hatch, and felt a drag on my spear's tip, followed by a slow screech. The floor rolled in waves beneath me, knocking me to the ground where I was scurried over by insects the size of a cat. I felt a pronged thing crawl over my chest, and this time I did not lay still, but gripped it with my hands and tore the prongs from their limb. Then the room roiled and churned, and I was being rolled systematically to some far corner.

The floor felt spongy and wet until I neared the wall, but the sudden dip felt like that which surrounds a drain, and I fought myself upright, using my spear as a prop. I felt the floor ripple where its tip stabbed, so I thrust it at intervals to guide the floor's clinching so that I was deposited into one of the cramped hallways. The mass inside the room I left gathered into a wall that barred me from entering that room again, so I turned and hurried into the next room before it too was barred. The mass was moving quickly to block my entry, apparently unaware of my presence, so I was free to explore more thoroughly, and found a row of thin rungs in one corner that led upward to a dark space. I groped in vain for a latch, and as the mass began to gather on the floor and creep towards me, I took to pounding on the hatch with the butt of my spear. Then I felt a fool, and I closed my eyes, calling upon that umbilical link I have to the crawl spaces of the cosmos and watched with a quaking heart as the mass gathered where I so recently stood clutching the rungs.

I rose directly upward, passing through a series of small cells where some of Jadus's thieves were being slowly consumed by what I guessed to be larval Devils. One looked at me and raised his arm, and the larva looked too as it sucked, following me with its clouded eyes as if it were planning to dessicate me next. My pace was slowed and I got a clear view of one larva, a pulpy thing with fledgling limbs and a quaffing appendage that emerged from its toothless, infantile mouth. Then I became aware that passing between the rift in Pandemonium was tantamount to a cog rowing through thick mud, so I moved through a wall into a wide, empty room before being bogged down in one of those cells.

That empty room remains empty in my memory. After what I'd seen I did not wish to see any more of what Blitzkrieg kept in his thrall, so I hurried to a wall, peered through its expanded fibers, saw a space where I could emerge and from there I panted my slow way through a closet filled with skins, doing my very best not to cry out in horror, and found myself in a heap on a drain in yet another chamber of that grim labyrinth. I wanted very badly to dwell in the between spaces, but passing through proved laborious, so I only did so when absolutely necessary, and my eyes bear the scars what the parasytes did to prisoners, and how the Devils' young, not yet bonded to a shell, were formed in vats of rendered foes, and set loose first upon prey who could run and fight to teach them savagery.

I found in one room a jinn with a most unsavory affect displaying an Angel's anatomy to a tall, thin Devil in segmented armor. The Angel looked glorious beneath its harness, and were I to see one of their women unadorned I may have fallen in love with her, no more likely to consummate than a tick would be with a hound. That Devil saw my face appear without a body to accompany it. I did not perform this trick, rather I stumbled upon it, struggling to remain hidden till I'd made it out of the room and into the tall, grinding hallway thundering out the sound of some faraway dynamo. But I lost my grip on the space that is no space, a slippery thing to grasp on the driest of days, and my face punched through. The Devil moved fast, pounding her fist onto my head. My shroud prevented my skull from caving in, but I was thrust down to the ground where I scrambled for cover.

I managed to regain my feet, but the Devil was now crawling like a centipede over the numerous vessels and work benches, lifting her legs over her head each time she shifted her aim, somersaulting over desks and retorts so strangely my spear could not make contact, and I wore myself out trying, ending up in her hands, close to her mournful visor. The light went dark, and I saw her clouded eyes beneath. It seemed there were pupils and irises beneath a film of faded flesh, and that they struggled to dilate. I felt as if my armor and arming clothes were being peeled away, molecule by molecule, so I wrenched against her grip suddenly and managed to free myself.

Of all my performances with the various weapons I've wielded, I am most proud of this; when she took me, I dropped my spear, but when I wrestled free, I picked it up and thrust so fast I'd planted it within her brain before her visor could close. It flickered, sparking against my spear, and to add cruelty to my dominance I invoked the jinn imbued into my weapon and spread her atoms to the walls. She was a towering beast that could have burst my head like a grape, which I and my spear turned to a chalky residue. I knew then what that jinn could do when the blade found purchase inside an opponent.