InterWorld

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

This is how to find dungeons, if you ever have friends in durance vile in a castle somewhere:

Try to keep out of sight. Find the back stairs. Then just keep going down until there isn’t any more down to go, to where the corridors are narrow and smell of damp and mildew, and it’s dark enough that, without the weird light that goes with you (if you’re lucky enough to have a mudluff coming along) you can’t see a thing. When you get to that place, I guarantee the dungeons are just around the corner.

The castle was more or less deserted. I ducked out of sight when I heard footsteps at the other end of a corridor, but that was all. And the people going past looked more like movers: They wore white overalls and were carrying chairs and lamps away with them. They looked like they were closing the place down.

I found the dungeons in about twenty minutes, no problem.

Well, one small problem—they were empty.

There were nine cells, nine windowless holes in living rock, with heavy iron doors that were solid save for small barred windows. All of them were empty. The only sounds were the skitter and chitter of rats and the dripping of water on mossy stones. I took a chance and shouted their names: “Jai! Jo! Josef!” But there was no reply.

I sat down on the stones of the dungeon floor. I’m not ashamed to say I had tears in my eyes. Hue flooped from around me and bobbed in the air beside me, patches of glow moving across his surface.

I said. “I’m too late, Hue. They’re probably all dead by now. Either they got boiled down like the HEX people said, or they died of old age waiting for me to come back. And it was…” I was going to say my fault, but I wasn’t sure that it was, really.

Hue was trying to attract my attention. He was floating in front of my face, extruding little multicolored psuedopods.

“Hue,” I said, “you’ve helped a lot so far. But I think we’ve come as far as we can now.”

An irritated crimson blush crossed the little mudluff’s bubble surface.

“Look, “I said. “I’ve lost them! What are you going to do? Tell me where they are?”

Hue’s surface shimmered, and then became whirls and clusters of stars in a night sky above and below. It was a place I recognized. Jay and Lady Indigo had called it the Nowhere-at-All. The Binary people called it the Static. By those or any other names, it was the fringe area of the In-Between, the long route for traveling between the planes.

“Well, even if that’s where they are,” I said, “there’s no way I can follow them there.”

But Jay’d followed me, hadn’t he? He got me off the Lacrimae Mundi.

It could be done, then.

But I didn’t know how to do it. I could only Walk through the In-Between itself. To reach the Nowhere-at-All would require knowledge of a whole different set of multidimensional coordinates, from someone familiar with those levels of reality—

I looked up. “Hue?” I said.

The mudluff moved away from me, slowly, foot after foot, until he was at the end of the dank corridor. And then he came barreling toward me, faster than a flowerpot falling from a window ledge, and even though I knew what he was going to do, I couldn’t help flinching back as he filled my vision and there was a—

poppp!

—and my world imploded into stars.

The mudluff was nowhere to be seen. Instead, everything felt very familiar. I got that déjà vu feeling of I’ve been here before, but of course I hadn’t: Last time I was falling through the Nowhere-at-All Jay was falling beside me, and we were falling away from the Lacrimae Mundi.

Now the wind between the worlds was whipping at my face and tearing my eyes; and the stars (or whatever they are, out in the Nowhere-at-All) were blurring past; and I was flailing, terrified at the emptiness of nothing but more terrified still because now I wasn’t falling away from anything.

I was falling toward something.

Imagine a doughnut or an inner tube—your basic toroidal shape. Paint it with something black and kind of slimy. Now take five of these and twist and turn and meld them together like those balloon thingies street artists sometimes do for kids—although I think that if you made one that looked like this for a kid, he’d start crying and not stop. Still with me? Now make the whole thing the size of a supertanker. Last, cover every curving surface of what you now have, which is a big black tubular evil thing, with derricks and towers and machicolated walls and ballistae and cannons and gargoyles and…

Get the idea?

This was not something you wanted to be falling toward. Trust me. It was something you wanted to be falling away from, as fast as possible.

But I didn’t have a choice.

I squinted my eyes against the wind. There were two or three dozen smaller ships—galleons, like the Lacrimae Mundi, and ships smaller and faster than her—arranged around the big black thing. They looked like ducks escorting a whale.

I knew I was looking at Lord Dogknife’s attack armada and dreadnought. It was the only thing it could be. They were beginning the assault on the Lorimare worlds.

I had finally found where my friends were being held prisoner—assuming they hadn’t already been reduced to Walker soup. The problem was that in a minute or so I was going to hit it like a melon dropped from a skyscraper, and there wasn’t a single thing I could do about it. The Nowhere-at-All isn’t outer space. It has air and something like gravity. If I hit the ship, I was dead. If I missed—and I had about as much chance of that as an ant missing a football field—I’d keep falling forever, unless I could open a portal into the In-Between, and there was no guarantee of that. I’d only made it last time because Jay was with me.

What would Jay do? I asked myself.

I thought you’d never ask, said a voice in the back of my head. It sounded like my voice, only a decade older and infinitely wiser. It wasn’t Jay or his ghost or anything like that. It was just me, I guess, finding a voice that I’d listen to.

You’re in a Magic region, now, Jay’s voice continued. Newtonian physics are more of a suggestion than a hard-and-fast rule. It’s strength of will that’s important.

It was a rehash of the lectures from Practical Thaumaturgy, or what we called “Magic 101.” “‘Magic’ is simply a way of talking to the universe in words that it cannot ignore,” our instructor had told us, quoting someone whose name I’ve already forgotten. “Some parts of the Altiverse listen—those are the Magic worlds. Some don’t and would rather that you listened to them. Those are the Science worlds. Understand that, and the whole thing is kind of simple.”

Of course, “kind of simple” is a relative concept in a school where even the remedial classes would give both Stephen Hawking and Merlin the Magician nosebleeds. Still, I had learned enough to know that the place I was in now was a place of raw and unfocused magic. A “subspace” that worked more by the rules of a collective consciousness than by mechanistic principles.

Will. That was the key.

You got it, said Jay in the back of my head. Now bring it home.

That giant evil woven doughnut thing was increasing in size as I fell toward it. It didn’t look particularly soft, and it looked damn hard to miss.

Okay then, I decided. I wouldn’t miss it. But I was not falling toward it—I was rising gently toward it. Rising so slowly, so gently that when I touched its surface it would be like thistledown touching the grass, a feather landing on a pillow—so delicately as to barely be there at all.

All I had to do was convince this part of the Altiverse that I wasn’t tumbling to my doom.

Which meant convincing myself…

I’m not falling, I told myself. I’m rising, easily and lightly. Soft and slow…

And I managed to ignore the tiny, sensible voice in the back of my head that was screaming in fear.

I wasn’t falling. I wasn’t falling….

It seemed like the wind in my face was easing up. Then everything suddenly shifted perspective a hundred and eighty degrees, and while my stomach was still trying to deal with that…

I hit the surface of the ship a lot harder than thistledown touching grass—hard enough, in fact, to knock the wind from my lungs and leave me gasping. But nothing was broken. I said thank you to Jay’s voice in the back of my head as I lay on the surface of the ship, holding on to a rope, trying to catch my breath.

Eventually I was able to sit up and look around. Hue was nowhere to be seen—hadn’t been since he somehow shifted me from the dungeon to the Nowhere-at-All. Okay, I was on my own—and I was on the ship.

Now what?

The answer wasn’t long in coming. Suddenly a hand grabbed me by the neck. More hands hauled me to my feet. They forced my arms behind my back and they marched me into a turret and down a dozen narrow stairwells, deep inside the huge dreadnought, to an enormous chamber that looked to be part map room, part inquisition chamber and part high school auditorium.

There was a smell in that room as if something had died some months ago, and they hadn’t yet found what it was to take it away—or didn’t care. It was a smell of rot and decay and mold.

Lady Indigo and Neville the jelly man were there, along with fifty or more other people I had never seen before. Some of them looked standard human—some were a lot more exotic.

And then there was one that I’d never seen before, but I knew who he was the minute he entered. He was the biggest man I had ever seen: so big, and so perfectly proportioned that it seemed as if everyone else in the room were no bigger than a little child. He wore black and crimson robes. His body, what I could see of it, was human and muscled like Michelangelo’s David. It was flawless.

But his face…

How to describe it? If you ever saw him, you’d never be able to forget him. His face would swim up at you as you began to fall asleep, and you’d wake up screaming.

Imagine a man who had started to transform into a hyena, like a werewolf turning into a wolf. Imagine him caught halfway through the transformation: his face half snout, his beard half coarse dog hair, his teeth sharp and made for ripping carrion. He had piglike eyes that gleamed red, with horizontal slits, like a ferret’s. A flattened nose and a jaw perpetually twisted into a ghastly parody of a smile.

He reminded me in a distorted way of pictures I’d seen of Anubis, the jackal-headed Egyptian god who conducted the dead to judgment. Maybe that was a better description, since that was pretty much what he was going to be doing to me.

But it wasn’t how he looked that promised nightmares. It was the sense of what lay behind that horrible mutated face—the knowledge that, to this thing, this monster, those nightmares were sweet entertainment. They were Mary Poppins–style Disney dances in the park.

Lord Dogknife smiled at me with sharp, sharp teeth and said, in a voice like honeyed swamp gas, “We were disappointed not to have picked you up in the snare last month, Joseph Harker. Thank you so much for returning.” He turned his hyena head. “You were right, Lady Indigo. The most powerful Walker in a decade. I can smell it. He’ll make fine fuel for the Malefic.”

He turned back to me, and I nearly screamed as those hideous eyes found me again. “You are fortunate,” he told me. “There is no other ship with the facilities to strip you completely of all extraneous matter, to flense you of flesh and hair and bones and fat, to reduce you to your absolute essentials: the power that lets you Walk from world to world, which is the power that lets us travel the Nowhere-at-All. No other ship but the Malefic.

“Take him away,” he said then, and several lackeys approached me as he said it. They seized me and started to drag me away from Lord Dogknife.

There was a sudden sparkle of colors above my head. I recognized the rainbow swirls, and my heart gave a great leap of relief. Hue had appeared and was bobbing toward me. I hoped he was planning to somehow teleport me out of there, as he’d done before when my team and I had been captured by Lady Indigo.

Lady Indigo said, “The mudluff, my lord.” There was no concern in her tone.

“Indeed,” Lord Dogknife said calmly in that thick, glottal voice. “I expected as much.” He held up one hand, to reveal a small glass pyramid, like a prism. He placed it on the floor and took a step back, muttering a single word as he did so. It sounded like “smucklethorrup-gobslotch,” but it probably wasn’t. There was a burst of light, black light—not like the purple light that you shine on posters to make the colors glow, but real black, like rays of obsidian, like a flashbulb going off in negative. It enveloped Hue, who began to turn white, and to shrink, and to change.

I knew that if Hue could have screamed, he would have done so.

“No!” I screamed—but it didn’t matter. The beams of blackness somehow compressed the little mudluff, squeezed him in a direction at right angles to all three dimensions in this world. Then the black rays began shining down into the little prism, and in seconds they were gone, leaving nothing but a white afterimage on the back of my eyes.

Lord Dogknife picked up the prism. Even from where I was standing, I could see a tiny bubble inside it, turning angry reds and furious crimsons. “They told me that the creature had become attached to you, boy,” he said. “So I brought along a holding tank for it. We used them, oh, many years ago, when we tried to colonize some of the madness places between the worlds. The creatures were a nuisance. The little tank won’t hold it for long—ten, twenty thousand years at the most—but I fancy none of us will be around when it breaks out.”

He put the prism into an inner pocket.

“I have often wished,” he said to me—and I don’t think I can ever really explain how disquieting and horrible it was to have him talking directly to me, looking straight into my eyes. It was bad enough when he addressed the room, but when Lord Dogknife looked at me, I felt like he knew every bad thing I’d ever done. And more than that—that he felt the bad things I’d done were the only bits of me that mattered and that everything else was insignificant and stupid.

“I have often wished,” he said again, “that we could harness the mudluffs. If we could use their energy, the way we use Walker energy, we would rule every world and every universe with ease: The whole glorious panoply of creation would be ours. But, alas, it does not seem practicable. There was one such attempt: But where the Earth upon which it was tried once was, now there is nothing but cosmic dust. Nothing larger than a baseball remains of it. No, we must make do with the life essences of children like you.” And he winked at me, as if he were telling me some slightly dirty joke. He was the thing that smelled like it had died a long time ago, the smell I’d noticed upon entering the huge chamber. You could taste the rottenness under the scent of dust.

I have never, in my life, been so scared of anything as I was of him. There may have been a little magic in the fear. But if there was, he didn’t need it.

“In your lifetime that is still to come,” said Lord Dogknife, “or to put it another way, boy, in the next thirty, forty minutes, you may take comfort in knowing that your essence—your soul, if you like—will, in company with so many of you little Walkers, be powering the ships and the vessels that will allow my people and our culture to gain the preeminence in all things that we so justly deserve. Does that make you happy, boy?”

I didn’t say anything.

The yellow fangs spread into a parody of a friendly smile. “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “Go down on your knees to me now. Kiss my feet. Promise to serve me forever in all things. Then I’ll spare your life. We have enough fuel to power the invasion. We brought every bottled soul we could find to this party. What do you say? Kissie footie?” And he waggled one of his huge feet at me. It was covered with black hair, and the toenails were claws.

I knew I was going to die then, because I wouldn’t kiss his feet. I looked him in the eyes and said, “You’d kill me anyway, wouldn’t you? You just want to humiliate me first.”

He laughed, and the room filled with the stench of rank meat, and he pounded on his leg with his hand as if I’d just told the best joke in the world. “I would!” he said, between bursts of laughter. “I would kill you anyway!” Then he drew breath. “Ohh,” he said, “I needed that. I’m so pleased you decided to drop in.”

Then: “Take him down to the rendering room,” he told those holding me. “Time to resect and reduce him and the others. No need to make it painless.” He turned back to me and winked once more and explained conversationally, “We find that a lot of pain inflicted on the Walkers during the whole rendering process actually spurs on their spirits when they’re bottled. Gives them something to focus on, perhaps. Well, good-bye, lad,” and he reached out a huge hand and pinched my cheek, almost affectionately, like an old uncle.

Then he squeezed, harder, and harder. I promised myself I wouldn’t cry out, but the pain became impossible to bear.

I screamed.

He winked at me once more slowly, as if we’d just shared a joke nobody else in the room had gotten, and he let go of my cheek.

They twisted my arms behind my back and they marched me out of there. I was so relieved to be away from Lord Dogknife that, for a few moments anyway, I barely cared that I was on my way to the rendering room.

Whenever I’d run across the phrase “a fate worse than death” in books, I’d wondered about it. I mean, death is about as bad as it gets, and as final, in the usual run of things, I always thought.

But the idea of being killed and cooked and stripped down to whatever makes me me—and then spending the rest of eternity in a bottle being used as some kind of cosmic power pack…

It made death look good, you know. It really did.