Malefactos's first glimpse of the Puncturium chamber left even him stunned and speechless with wonder, much to the amusement of Karm, the rak mainly responsible for the room's maintenance. He'd been working here ever since the early days of the Shadow, a hundred years earlier, and had seen many an arrogant, self important rak humbled and laid low by his first visit here. Four walls, a floor and a ceiling, he thought, in no little awe himself despite the time he'd served here, his familiarity with this place. This could be any room anywhere in the world, except for what it contains.

Once, it had been a ballroom, one of several in the eight wings of a palace that was so large it was almost a city in itself. It was almost a hundred yards long and half that wide, and the ceiling was so high that rock giants could have walked around inside without bumping their heads. Six giant chandeliers had once hung from the ceiling, each one supporting hundreds of gemstones that had emitted light by virtue of the magic spells cast on them.

Beautifully carved tables and chairs had once stood against the walls, giving the dancers the chance to rest their feet and enjoy a glass of wine now and again during a long night of dance and music, and a low stage had once stood at the end of the room on which the smartly dressed orchestra had played waltzes and talatas on their beautiful silver and gold instruments. None of this now remained. It had been cleared away centuries ago to leave only flaking plaster and disintegrating wood paneling to make room for the room's new function.

The whole room shimmered with power, like the heat haze rising from a hot road in the middle of summer, and even with his rak vision Malefactos had trouble seeing details in the pillars and alcoves that lined the room's far wall. He had the sense of tremendous energies just barely held in check, energies so powerful that they could lay waste to half the city if released, and it was all focused inwards, towards a spot in the exact centre of the room where something insane and terrible was happening.

"Go ahead," said Karm. "Have a closer look."

Malefactos glanced at him, thinking for a moment that the other rak was mocking his evident fascination, but Karm seemed to be totally sincere and so with a shrug of his shrunken, leathery shoulders he stepped forward. He paused uncertainly for a moment as the room's energies closed around him, making him feel as though thousands of ants were swarming all over his body, but it seemed to be harmless and so, with another look back at Karm, he continued on.

The feeling intensified as he got closer to the centre, where the power was denser, and he noticed with interest that a crackling nimbus of rainbow colours was dancing all over his body. The phenomenon distracted his attention only for a moment, however, as he got close enough to the object at the centre of the room to get a better idea of what it was.

It was a spinning, dancing, shimmering, vibrating area of pure chaos, pure insanity. It was impossible to look at directly. The eye seemed to keep sliding off it, or perhaps it was the object itself dancing off to the side whenever he tried to focus on it so that he could only see it out of the corner of his eye. What he could see of it, however, suggested that perhaps he was better off not being able to see it properly, as if its behaviour and properties were so crazy that a proper look at it would twist his mind.

He didn't need to see it to know what it was, though. It was the place where all the magical energies in the room came together, came to a focus. Pulling at a single point to prise it open against the almost unimaginable stiffness and resistance of the fabric of space itself, like the jaws of a mantrap held an inch apart against the full strength of its steel spring by a million lengths of cotton running away in all directions. It was the Puncturium. A tiny opening in the structure of space connecting Tharia's universe with the seething nightmare that was The Pit.

Malefactos felt a moment of real fear as he imagined what would happen if the spells holding the Puncturium open were to fail. The transdimensional opening would immediately slam shut, and the energy released would be enough to blast him and half the city to oblivion. He suddenly remembered Karm watching him, though, and, realising that he may have seen his fear, he decided to put on a show of bravado to prove his courage. He looked at the Puncturium out of the corner of his eye, getting an idea of its position, and then reached out his hand towards it.

There was a satisfying gasp of shock from the other rak as he realised what he was doing, and then he felt a strange prickling in his hand as it entered the transdimensional rift. He looked at his arm, and found to his surprise that he still couldn't see the Puncturium properly, even though he now had it pinned down. His eyes still refused to focus on it, as if they knew better than he what was best for him.

He pushed his arm in further, and watched in fascination as it vanished up to the elbow. My hand's in the Pit, he thought in wonderment. I'm in two planes of existence at the same time. I wonder what it looks like from the other side. He pushed his arm in further, wondering how wide the hole was. Maybe I can get my head in, he thought excitedly.

Then there was a sharp pain in his hand and he snatched it back hurriedly. He stared at it in horror and fascination. There, dangling from his bony, mummified hand, hanging on by the teeth, was one of the most horrible creatures he'd ever seen. It looked a bit like a common earthworm except that it was about three feet long, an inch thick and had a small human head, its red eyes glaring at him in stupid, mindless malice and its teeth gnawing at his fingers as it tried to do him as much harm as possible. He pulled it free with his other hand and held it up to get a better look at it.

It was a Wum-Gubba, one of the nastiest but least dangerous inhabitants of the Pit. Like everything in the immortal planes, it had once been the soul of a living creature, a man by the look of it, but whereas most souls gained a spiritual body identical in outward appearance to the ones they'd had in life, this one had led such a petty, spiteful life, so full of trivial, gratuitous nastiness, that he'd been given a body to match. This had once been the sort of person who stole sweets from babies and pinched them to make them cry, who told lies about people just to get them in trouble and who stole or smashed people's most treasured possessions just to hurt them, and Malefactos felt nothing but loathing for the pitiful worm wriggling in his hands, mewling in terror.

And yet, even a Wum-Gubba could hope for better things in the future. If it was one of the few spirits of the dead that could endure eternity without growing weary of it and fading out of existence it would slowly grow in knowledge and power, even though it was starting out far below the level of most of the immortal souls that wound up in the Pit. It would climb with painful slowness up the demonic hierarchy until, unimaginable ages from now, it became a demon in its own right. Everything in the immortal planes had started out as the soul of a dead person, even the Shadowlord. Even the Gods Themselves, although they'd certainly never been human. It took so long to reach the top that, to be Gods now, they must have started the long climb millions of years ago. The Gods worshipped by humans might have been G'Toff or Stalori or Strakin or members of any of the other races that had inhabited the planet Tharia before the advent of humanity.

Having reached such a pinnacle of power was no guarantee of security, though. Power could be lost as well as gained, and the most common way in which it was lost was by the deliberate action of others, either ambitious youngsters coming up from below or jealous oldsters up above. Many people claimed to have killed demons, and they could indeed be killed although it was unimaginably difficult. What usually happened when a demon was 'killed', though, was that it lost much of its power, falling back down the ladder of achievement, in the worst cases maybe ending up as a creature like the one he was holding in his hand. As one of his teachers had told him in his youth, the afterlife was a bit like a game of snakes and ladders.

The Wum-Gubba was beginning to disintegrate now, the spiritual matter of which it was composed being unable to survive long in the world of the living. It wasn't dying, though, but would reform back in the Pit and carry on with whatever it had been doing before he'd interrupted it. He watched in fascination as it melted into translucent slime, dripping onto the floor and evaporating, and he grimaced at its sheer ugliness, its total repulsiveness. What a contrast between it and the equivalent entities in the Paradise planes, he thought. There, the souls of babies and the severely mentally handicapped, incapable of supporting a normal human body, become butterflies with angelic human faces, and great clouds of the beautiful, iridescent creatures flock above the summer garden landscapes, bringing joy and happiness to the blissful souls who inhabit them.

He rubbed his hand against his sticklike legs to get rid of the last of the creature and then returned to Karm, who was watching with frank admiration in the doorway. "One thing puzzles me," Malefactos said as he reached his side. "That is the opening through which the Shadowlord's power is entering this world, no doubt about that, but it's not the source of the Shadow. I had thought that both would have the same source, but I see now that that's not so. What, then, is the source of the Shadow?"

"No doubt Algol will reveal that to you when he judges the time to be right," replied the other rak. "In the meantime, apply your mind to the task of opening the Puncturium further, as he commanded. You do not want to risk his wrath."

Indeed not, agreed Malefactos, and so for the next few hours the two raks cast spell after spell into the room, increasing the power holding the Puncturium open. The effect upon the transdimensional rift was negligible, but Malefactos knew that it had grown a tiny little bit larger, taking it just that little bit closer to the point where its own internal stability would be stronger than the forces trying to close it. When that happened, it would open all the way, becoming a stable, permanent portal through which the Shadowlord himself would be able to step, should he so choose. The comparison with a mantrap came to him again. You had to struggle and strain to get it open, but once you had it wide enough it would stay open all by itself, at least until some unfortunate person stepped on it. Yes, that was the other way in which the Puncturium resembled a mantrap...

Eventually, they used up the last of their magical power and the two raks slumped in exhaustion. "Rest now and renew yourself," said Karm. "Levka here will show you to your rooms, where you can relax and study your spellbooks." He indicated a wight that had appeared next to them, a small, servile creature with long, straggly white hair and whose sunken, undead eyes glowed with an eerie, inner light. "When you're recovered, Algol will send someone to give you your next duties."

Duties, thought Malefactos bitterly as the wight led him away. I do not perform duties. High time I was out of here. There was just one more thing he wanted to learn before he left, though. He wanted to learn the source of the Shadow. And also, the idea of leading an attack force against the University tempted him considerably. Just a few more days then, he thought therefore. I'll wait just a few more days.

His rooms were in another wing of the palace, half a mile away. Half a mile! he thought in wonder despite himself. Half a mile away and still in the same building! This place is vast beyond all comparison! The main sitting room, into which the door opened, was enormous and must once have been luxurious beyond the dreams of most minor kings and chieftains, but now it was bare and empty, dark and covered with dust. The current inhabitants of the palace had no need for furniture and decorations. The raks had the power to simply create anything they needed while most of the lesser undead were trapped in the past. They saw the whole palace as it had been in its days of glory and were virtually incapable of understanding that it had changed. Any attempt to brighten the place up for their benefit would therefore be pointless.

Levka waited patiently in the doorway, waiting to see if Malefactos wanted anything more from him, but the rak waved a hand dismissively and the wight left, closing the door behind him. Malefactos looked around the room. There were other rooms leading off from this one, including a bedroom and a dining room, but since he no longer needed to either eat or sleep this first room was all he would need. There wasn't really much point in wasting any magic redecorating, since he'd be leaving soon, but he had to do something or they might grow suspicious. He'd do something to the walls and ceilings, perhaps, as soon as he'd regained his magic. A few tapestries, perhaps, depicting some of his earlier achievements. He liked tapestries. And perhaps a tiled floor. An image of his own face when he'd been young and ambitious, casting high level spells all over the place with no thought for the future. His dead, leathery mask of a face creased itself into a sort of a smile as he remembered those days.

He went over to one of the windows and looked out at the crumbling wasteland that had once been the Imperial gardens. Far off, below, he could see the rest of the city. Dark and forbidding but twinkling in his rak vision with the multitudes of undead who inhabited it. Overhead, the Shadow shimmered in a million iridescent colours like the surface of a soap bubble. It was beautiful in its own way, although he doubted that anyone but a rak would have thought so, and it surprised him to find that he was still capable of appreciating beauty in his present condition.

He realised that he was wasting time and that, worse, anyone who somehow became aware of his present train of thought would realise that there was something fundamentally different between him and the other raks working for the Shadowlord. He left the window, therefore, pulled out one of his pocket spellbooks and began to read.