InterWorld

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The corridors got narrower and darker as we descended from level to level. They also got hotter, as if the huge dreadnought were steam driven, which increased my sense of descending into an inferno. From the moment I had entered the Malefic, dark and gloomy had been the order of the day, and it only got worse as we went down.

We went down still more narrow stairwells—the “rendering room” had to be on one of the lowest levels of the ship. I was grateful for that. It gave me more time to think. There were two guards ahead of me and two behind. The corridors and stairs were, probably intentionally, like some kind of labyrinth, and I knew that I was hopelessly lost.

But as tight and confining as those corridors were, they were nothing compared to the hamster maze my own mind was running in.

Lord Dogknife had ordered me killed along with “the others.” That meant only one thing: My team might still be alive.

And if they were, we still had a ghost of a chance.

Only a ghost, though. Five trapped versions of myself against who knew how many thousands of HEX troopers, sorcerers, demons…frankly, it would be long odds if we were up against just Lord Dogknife and Lady Indigo. Without Hue to help us, we had about as much chance as…well, as nothing.

I knew all that. Even so, just the possibility that they might still be alive raised my spirits.

There was something definitely hellish about the lower levels of the Malefic. I started to imagine that I could smell sulphur and brimstone on the air. And then the guards in front of me opened a heavy wooden door, bound and bolted with bronze, and pushed me roughly through it, and the smell got worse.

Imagine Hell, the way you’ve always pictured it since childhood. Now, imagine that the worst torture pit of Hell is in a room barely as big as a high school classroom. Imagine it was designed by someone who had seen too many really cheap old horror movies, the kind they show late at night in black and white. That was the rendering room.

The rendering room was windowless, just like nine-tenths of the rest of the rooms I’d seen. On the walls hung various tools and implements, scary and sharp and huge. I didn’t study them too closely, but they looked like they were to help “cook us down” once we were in the pot and had been boiling for a while. At the back of the room, sitting on a raised grill, was an honest-to-goodness cooking pot, forged of bronze and easily ten feet across, like a giant’s cauldron or a cartoon cannibal pot, raised high on three thin metal legs. Some kind of liquid was boiling inside it—from the smell, most definitely not water. It smelled like liquid sulphur, and ammonia, and preserving fluids. There was blood in there, too, I think—the kind of magic they did on that ship draws a lot of power from blood. The fire underneath was being fed with various salts and powders. It burned now green, now red, now blue as different chemicals were added. The smoke and fumes clouded the air and stung my eyes and hurt my lungs. There was a little creature, who looked a bit like a toad and a bit like a dwarf, feeding the fire with the powders, being careful to make sure that only one small handful of powder went on the flames at a time.

None of the people doing the tending and preparation were human. It was kind of hard to make out details, since most of the light in that place came from the flames under the pot, but they had tentacles and feelers. I didn’t know if they came from fringe worlds way out on the Arc or if they were people transformed into things that didn’t mind the thick chemical smoke or the burning air or the things they had to do down there. I don’t suppose it matters. My guards, on the other hand, minded the smoke and the air a lot. Two of them stopped outside, one on each side of the closed door. The other two, who walked me into the room, had handkerchiefs over their mouths and noses, and tears streaming down their faces.

A thing came toward us. It could have been a praying mantis, if they grew them that big and gave them human eyes. It chittered disapprovingly at my captors.

“Is keep out here,” it told them. “Not for breathing. Rendering about to commence. Go away. Leave this place. Tch-tch-tch! Not for your kind in here now.”

And then the smoke cleared for a moment, and I saw them on the other side of the cauldron. My heart leapt. They were trussed, hand and foot, and they were on the ground, like rabbits ready for the pot. My teammates.

I could see at a glance that they were all there: Jai, Jakon, J/O, Jo and Josef. And they were conscious. They looked haggard and hopeless. I didn’t know how long it had been for them—days? weeks? months?—but it didn’t look like it had been a pleasant stay. All of them had lost weight, even little J/O.

They also didn’t look surprised to see me. Maybe word had already filtered down that I’d been captured, or maybe they’d just been expecting it. I’d screwed up enough so far; it was kind of obvious that I’d do it again, one final time. They simply looked at me, and the resignation in their faces cut me to the bone.

What made it worse was that I knew they were right. This wasn’t the kind of place that you made a dramatic last-minute escape from. This was the kind of place you died in.

Painfully, slowly and full of regret.

One of my escorts let go of me, took a step forward and said, “Got another one to pop in the pot. Lord Dogknife’s orders.”

There was a belch of sulphur from the flames below the pot, and my other guard took his hands off me to wipe his streaming eyes.

And that was when I sprang into action.

Well, “sprang” isn’t quite the word, but it sounds better than “stumbled and kicked,” which is what I did. I stumbled forward, and then I kicked, as hard as I could, at the nearest strut of the tripod holding up the giant cauldron.

I wish I could tell you that I had a brilliant plan. I didn’t. I just wanted to buy us a little more time. Or do something, anyway.

It was like being in a car accident. Everything happened so slowly, then…

The leg of the tripod leaned over, out of position.

I could see my guards, coughing and spluttering, coming for me.

The cauldron began to tip.

The toad thing, who had been feeding the various salts into the flames so carefully, dropped the whole tray of powders into the flames as it sprang back out of the way, straight into the nearest guard, who cursed and stumbled backward into the mantid.

I threw myself over to the side of the cauldron as the powders in the flame erupted like a tiny fireworks display….

And slowly, majestically and unstoppably, the cauldron tipped over.

I will never forget the guard raising his hand, as if to keep the cauldron from falling onto him, and the way it just kept falling. I will never forget the molten stuff in the cauldron splashing and pouring out, nor the screams of the creatures as it touched them. That stuff burned, and it kept on burning. Even through bone.

I was choking. I could hardly breathe. The world was swimming around me, and I could feel the tears running down my cheeks. But I kept going.

I picked up what looked like a boning knife from the floor, and I started to cut my teammates’ ropes. I picked Jo first, cutting the ropes that bound her wings, then slitting her gag.

“Thanks,” she said.

“Wings,” I gasped. “Air. Fan us. Air.” I moved on to Jakon.

Jo nodded, then stretched her wings and began to flap them, blowing the choking smoke away from us. There was fresh air coming up through the grill—to feed the fire, I guess—and I gulped it, and wiped my eyes, and kept sawing away at the ropes with the knife. Jakon seemed the liveliest of the team, wriggling and moving in her bonds, and she sprang out, snapping the last of the ropes before I’d even finished.

Then she bared her teeth, growled deeply and sprang at me.

I ducked.

Over my head went the wolf girl, tearing into the mantid, which had been coming for me with a cleaver.

With one angry blow she tore its head off, and the body stumbled about, cleaver waving, blind and angry.

I freed Josef next. The ropes that bound him were thick as ship’s cables. I loosed his hands, then handed him a knife and told him to do the ones around his feet himself. He rubbed his hands and grimaced, and then cut through his ropes twice as fast as I had done.

Out of the corner of my eye I could see Jakon guarding us like a wolf guarding her cubs, every hair on her head standing straight up, her teeth bared, and Jo, who was still fanning the air, and who had also grabbed a pike from the wall and was jabbing it at any of the nasties who dared to approach her. Not that many of them did. Most of them were huddling in the corner and trying to keep away from the flaming molten river between us and them.

I freed Jai.

He rolled uncomfortably on the ground. “I’m paresthetic,” he said, “all pins and needles. Also, I am deeply, utterly beholden to you.”

“No problem,” I said.

I slit J/O’s gag. “Typical,” he said. “Leave me to last. Just because I’m the smallest. I suppose you think that’s fair. Mmmph, mmph mph mmmmmmph.” He said that last because I’d put the gag back into his mouth.

“Actually,” I said, “what you mean is, ‘Thank you.’ And if you don’t say it, I’m going to forget about cutting you loose and leave you here, accidentally on purpose.”

I took the gag out. His eyes looked very big and very round.

“Thank you,” he said in a small voice, “for coming back. For setting me loose. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” I told him. “Don’t mention it.” And I cut his feet loose and then his hands.

The smoke was beginning to thin now, and the fire was behaving more like a fire and less like Vesuvius. My teammates and I gathered together. I guessed there must be strong fireproofing spells on the rendering room—the flames weren’t spreading to the walls or to the ceiling or floor. And they were starting to go down.

“We must perforce perambulate with all possible dispatch,” Jai said. “No doubt our sudden revolutionary upheaval has activated numerous alarm cantrips.”

“We won’t be able to fight our way through the entire ship,” Jo said, “but dying in battle is better than dying in a pot of boiling blood.”

“We are not dying in battle or in blood,” I told her. “It’s not going to happen. But the only door is on the other side of the fire.”

“Actually,” said J/O with a certain smug joy at the edge of his voice, “there’s a concealed door just down there. I saw one of the squirmy things come out of it when they brought us in.”

“Good eye,” I said. “But how do we open it? It’ll be protected by spells or something like that, won’t it?”

On the other side of the flames, the guard, who was still standing, and the various creepies were regrouping and staring at us and talking. We didn’t have surprise on our side any longer. We had to move, one way or another.

Josef shrugged. Then he spat on his hands, reached down and heaved. The muscles on the side of his neck bulged. He grunted with the strain, and then moved back. The outline of a hatch was visible, where the grill met the wall. He grinned, then he slammed it with his massive foot, hard.

There was now a hatch-sized hole in the wall.

“Spells are one thing,” he said. “Brute force is another. Let’s go.”

Those of us who had no weapons pulled them from the wall of the rendering room. I paused and picked up a small leather sack, filled with some kind of powder, that was hanging on the wall.

“What’s that?” asked J/O.

“No idea,” I said. “But my guess is it’s the stuff they were throwing on the fire. Some kind of gunpowder. It couldn’t hurt.”

He made a face. “I don’t think it’s gunpowder. It’s some weird magical stuff. Eye of newt or whatever. You’d better leave it here.”

That decided me. I thrust the pouch into my pocket, and then we went through the hole, down a narrow passage hardly bigger than a ventilation shaft.

J/O was in the lead, and Jakon brought up the rear. The rest of us did the best we could in the middle, blundering into one another in the dark.

“You took your time,” said Jo. I heard feathers rustle as she hunched her wings together.

“I came as soon as I could. What happened to all of you?”

“They took us to a sort of a prison place,” said J/O. “We were in individual cells. We weren’t allowed to talk to anyone, read or anything. And the food—yechh. I found a bug in mine.”

“The bugs were the best part,” said Jakon. “They didn’t even bother to interrogate us. It was pretty obvious we were for the pot.” She hesitated, and I sensed her shivering in the dark. “I met Lord Dogknife. He said we’d suffer, that he’d see to it.”

I remembered that hideous goblin face smiling at me. “He said the same thing to me,” I told them. “It makes for maximum fuel efficiency.” I was glad no one could see my face in the dark.

“We hoped you would come back for us,” Jo said, “or that you’d get back to InterWorld and they would send out a search and rescue party. But as the weeks went by and you didn’t come, we started to lose hope. And when they took us to HEX Prime and put us on the Malefic, I think we all knew we were dead meat.”

I briefly explained what had happened—how HEX had used a shadow realm to throw us off the trail and how I’d been mustered out and mind wiped, only to regain my memory, thanks to Hue. Just about the time I finished, J/O said he saw light ahead.

It took another ten minutes of walking before the rest of us saw it—J/O’s cybervision was much more sensitive to light than ordinary eyes. But eventually we all came out of the tunnel and into the light, and stared down in awe.

We stood on a mezzanine overlooking what had to be the engine room. I’m still not sure how the Malefic flew, but if sheer size counts for anything, the engines had power to spare. They were gigantic. The chamber must have taken up the entire lowest level of the ship. Below us were enormous pistons and valves and rotating gears as big as the city rotunda back in Greenville. Steam shot from huge petcocks, and bus bars slammed together with deafening clangs. It reminded me of pictures I’d seen of the engine rooms on old ocean liners like Titanic—only those ships didn’t have trolls and goblins tending the machinery.

Then Jai touched my arm and pointed to one side. I turned, and saw what was powering the engines: a huge wall stacked floor to ceiling with what looked like large apothecary jars, or old-fashioned apple cider bottles, made of thick glass. In each of them was what looked like the glow of a firefly, without the firefly—a gentle luminescence that pulsed slightly in rhythm with the pounding machinery. They came in many colors, from firefly green to fluorescent yellows and oranges and eye-popping purples. A tube went up from the top of each jar to a huge pipe in the ceiling, which went down to the center of the engine.

“These are our brothers,” whispered Jai.

“And sisters,” added Jakon.

I touched the side of one cold jar with my hand, and it glowed a bright orange at my touch, as if it recognized me. Inside these jars was the fuel that drove the dreadnought: the essence of Walkers like me, disembodied, bottled and enslaved.

The glass, or whatever material it was, seemed to vibrate slightly. All I could think of was that scene from a hundred different horror movies, in which someone who’s been possessed has a moment of sanity and pleads, “Kill me!”

“That could have been us,” growled Jakon.

“It still could be,” rumbled Josef.

“It’s an abomination,” said Jo. “I wish there was something we could do for them.”

“There is,” said Jai. His mouth was an angry line. Jai had always seemed so gentle. Now I could feel his anger in the air, like static before a thunderstorm.

He furrowed his brow and stared at a glass jar far above us. I thought I saw it shiver. Jai concentrated harder, closing his eyes—and the jar shattered, exploding with a pop! like a firecracker. A light hung in the air where the jar had been, edging nervously about, as if it were unused to freedom.

I looked at the others. We were all in agreement.

The iron thing I’d taken from the rendering room looked something like a poleax, with a blade on one side of the head and a blunt hammer on the other. The right tool for the job, as Dad would say.

I stepped forward. I yelled as I swung it—a savage cry that almost drowned out the sound of it smashing into the jars. About five of them shattered with the first blow. The glows within those bottles flared brightly, enough to leave an afterimage.

The rest of the team went at it with just as much enthusiasm and more. The air was filled with flying glass and strobing lights. I stole a glance over my shoulder. Pandemonium was taking place down in the engine room. The huge pistons were stuttering, pumping out of sequence or stopping completely. Steam was venting more and more furiously from various valves and exploding from pipes. Goblins, gremlins and other kinds of fairy-tale rejects were scrambling around like rats on hot tin, panicked.

The great machine was stopping.

At the moment, I didn’t care. I just cared about freeing the souls of all the different versions of me from their glass prisons. As each bottle smashed and popped, I felt brighter and stronger. More complete.

More alive.

I realized that Josef was actually singing as he smashed. He had a high, tenor voice. It seemed to be a song about an old woman, her nose and a number of herrings; and it made me wonder what kind of world he came from.

And then I noticed something.

The lights weren’t fading, once they were freed from their bottles. They were hanging there in space. If anything they were getting brighter, pulsing their firefly colors. They were collecting just above our heads. I didn’t know if what was left of them could appreciate what we did or not. It didn’t matter. We knew.

Jakon smashed the final bottle; and it popped and cracked, and the soul inside was freed, and rose to hang with the others.

Everything was electric. I mean that literally—it felt like the air was supercharged: Every hair on my body was standing on end. I was scared to touch anything in case I might somehow zap it to cinders. And the lights hung above us.

Maybe we imagined it, but if we did, we all imagined it at the same time. I like to think that because, on some very real level, they were us—or they had once been us, before they were slaughtered and used to power a ship between the worlds—that what they thought spilled over to us.

They thought revenge. They thought destruction. They thought hate. And, observing us, they pulsed something that felt a whole lot like thank you.

The soul lights began to glow more and more brightly, so brightly that all of us except Jakon and J/O were forced to look away. And then they moved, and I thought I could hear the wind whistling as they went.

Down by the engines the trolls and goblins were bolting everywhere in terror and panic. They didn’t have a chance in hell—literally. As the lights hit them, each one of them burst into something that looked like an X-ray image that flared and then was gone.

The lights reached the engines.

I suppose that I’d hate those engines, too, if I’d been driving them with everything I had, everything I was. When the sparks reached the engines, they vanished. It was like the steel and iron and bronze and steam had somehow sucked them in.

“What are they doing?” asked J/O.

“Hush,” said Jakon.

“I hate to go all practical and everything,” I said, “but Lord Dogknife and Lady Indigo are probably sending more troops down that tunnel after us right about now. In fact, I’m surprised they haven’t—”

“Quiet,” said Jo. “I think she’s going to blow.”

And then she blew, and it was wonderful. It was like a light show and a fireworks show and the destruction of Sauron’s tower…everything you could imagine it could be. The Malefic’s engines seemed to start to dissolve in light, in flame, in magic; and then, with a rumble that grew into a prehistoric roar, they blew.

“That is indubitably an supereminent conflagration,” sighed Jai, a huge smile on his face.

“Nice,” agreed Josef. “Pretty.”

If there was a warranty on the Malefic’s engines, it had been well and truly voided now.

Then, as the dust settled, I felt it with my mind. Where the engines had been below us was now a portal to the In-Between: the biggest gate I’d ever encountered.

“There’s a gate down there,” I said. “I suppose that the whole fabric of space-time must have been under pressure from the engines. Now the engines are gone, they’ve left a place we can get through.”

Jakon growled, in the back of her throat. “Then we’d better do it fast,” she said. “I can smell a whole battalion of the scum coming up behind us, down that passage.”

“And besides,” said Jai, “I think our friends have only just begun to fight.”

I looked, and he was right, because the soul sparks were now even brighter now, as they rose from the place where the engines had been and made their way through the ceiling to the floor above.

“I can fly J/O down there,” said Jo. “Jai can teleport himself and probably carry Joey or Jakon. But Josef’s a bit big to be carried.”

Josef shrugged. “S’okay,” he said. “I can jump.”

We all knew he could survive it. My only concern was him maybe going right through the floor and into the Nowhere-at-All.

But there was no time for hesitation or second thoughts. I could hear the clatter of boots in the tunnel, coming toward us. We’d have to move. And the portal wasn’t going to be there for very long: It felt unstable.

There was only one problem.

“Guys,” I said. “Lord Dogknife’s got Hue. And I’m not leaving without him. He’s saved my life more than once. He’s saved all of us. I’m sorry. I’ll get you through the gate if you want. But I’m staying for Hue.”

And then the first of the soldiers came through the door.