InterWorld (12 page)

“The Spartan mothers used to say, ‘Come back with your shield or on it.’ But you’re on your way, and I’ll never see you again, shield or no shield. No one’s ever going to send me a medal or a—what do they do, now that they don’t send telegrams?—or a message, saying ‘Dear Mrs. Harker, we regret to inform you that Joey died like a…died like a…’”

I thought she was going to cry, but she took a deep breath and just sat there for a bit.

“You’re letting me go?” I asked.

She shrugged. “I spent my life hoping I would have kids who would be able to tell the difference between right and wrong. Who, when the decisions, the big decisions, need to be made, would do the right thing. I believe you, Joey. And you’re doing the right thing. How could I ever stop you now?

“Wherever you go. Whatever happens to you. Know this, Joey. I love you, I’ll always love you, and I think…I
know
you’re doing the right thing. It just…hurts, that’s all.”

Then she hugged me. My face was wet, and I don’t know if they were her tears or my own.

“We’ll never see each other again, will we?” asked my mom.

I shook my head.

“Here,” she said. “I made it for you. It’s a good-bye thing.
I’m not sure what else I can give you.” And she pulled a little stone on a chain from her pocket. It looked black and then, when it caught the light, it glinted blue and green like a starling’s wing. She fastened it about my neck.

“Thanks,” I said. “It’s lovely.” And then I said, “I’ll miss you.”

“I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “It gave me something to do.” And then she said, “I’ll miss you, too. Come back, if you can. When you’ve saved the universe.”

I nodded. “Will you tell Dad?” I asked. “Tell him I love him. And that he’s been the best dad anyone could hope for.”

She nodded. “I’ll tell him. I could wake him up, if you like…?”

I shook my head. “I have to go,” I told her.

“I’ll wait here,” she said. “For a bit. In case you come back.”

“I won’t,” I told her.

“I know you won’t,” she said. “But I’ll wait.”

I went out into the night.

It was below freezing outside. I slipped into the mind-set that had supposedly been scoured from my head, and started casting about for a potential portal.

I hoped there would be one nearby—I didn’t like the notion of having to walk (without a capital W) very far in this weather. I can’t just open a portal to the In-Between
anywhere I feel like. I wish I could. But it doesn’t work that way. Certain transdimensional points of space-time have to be congruent, and these come and go. It’s like catching a cab—if you’re lucky one might stop for you outside your house, but it’s more likely you’ll have to hike a bit, maybe even as far as the nearest hotel or restaurant where there’s a taxi stand. There are places where you’re more likely to find potential portals. Unfortunately, they’re not always near restaurants or hotels.

It may sound strange, but I didn’t let myself think about that conversation with Mom. There were just too many surprises to deal with—I could feel the fuses in my mind threatening to blow every time I came close to thinking of it. I concentrated instead on finding a portal.

I didn’t feel the faint tingle in my head that usually indicates there’s one nearby, so I started trotting down the street, my breathing puffing out in clouds as I went. I found myself wondering what the soap bubbles I’d been blowing earlier for the squid would do in subzero weather.

A moment later I found out—sort of.

Hue came swooping out of the night and hovered before me. He pulsed an urgent spectrum at me: green, orange, yellow, pearl. It occurred to me that maybe his patterning was even more complex than I had assumed it was—that instead of being a symptom of basic emotional states it was actually a language. Because he certainly
seemed to be trying to tell me something now.

When he was sure he had my attention, he scooted off, pausing now and then to make sure I was following. Which I was. We stopped in a tiny park—practically nothing more than a lawn without a house behind it—about six blocks from my house. Hue seemed to be waiting for me.

I knew what he wanted. I cast about for the nascent portal I knew would be here. And found it.

I looked up at Hue, floating there patiently. “Thanks, buddy,” I said. And I fitted my mind into that transdimensional congruency like a key into a lock, and opened that lock and swung the door wide.

Beyond was a shifting, rickety landscape that looked like a
Doctor Strange
comic book. I squared my shoulders, took a last look around, drew a deep breath—

and went for a Walk.

Hue was nowhere to be seen when I got into the In-Between, which made me feel kind of relieved, to be honest.

Don’t get me wrong; I was grateful to the little guy. But if I’d never met him…well, my life would sure have been a heck of a lot simpler. Jay would still be alive, for one thing. And maybe I’d still be happy and at home with my family and not off trying to save the Multiverse, or whatever it was that I was trying to do.

I stood on a rock that felt the way that fresh oregano smells and that tumbled through the madness of the In-Between in a crashing arpeggio of double-bass music. I rode it like a surfer rides a board, and I thought about where I should go from here.

I said I remembered everything, but that wasn’t quite true. I remembered
almost
everything. But, rummage around in my head as much as I wanted, I couldn’t find the key that would let me go back to Base Town. (There was something…some way…but it was as elusive as the shape of a hole in your tooth after it had been filled or the name of a man you knew that definitely began with
S
—if it didn’t begin
with
L
or
V
or
W
. It was gone. Which makes sense, I guess—of all my memories, the key to InterWorld Prime would be the biggest secret to keep.)

Meanwhile, in the back of my head, a voice like gas wheezing through honey was saying, “We are ready to begin the assault on the Lorimare worlds. The phantom gateways we will be creating will make a counterattack or rescue impossible. When they are empowered, the usual Lorimare coordinates will then open notional shadow realms under our control. Now, with another fine Harker at our disposal, we will have all the power we need to send in the fleet. The Imperator of the Lorimare worlds is already one of ours….”

Lord Dogknife’s words had meant nothing when I had heard them originally, coming from the mouth of Scarabus—they had just been one more thing among entirely too many things that I didn’t understand. But now, in the light of everything that had occurred, they made perfect—and horrifying—sense.

Phantom gateways, leading to notional shadow realms. Yes.

Shadow realms, like the one that six kids, heading out to find three beacons on a training mission, wound up in. We thought we were going to one of the Lorimare worlds, and instead we wound up in a shadow dimension. The concept had been touched on as a theoretical possibility in one of the
classes at Base Town: They were also known as “oxbow worlds,” named after the oddly shaped lakes that were sometimes left when a meandering river cuts off a section of itself. Think of the river as a time stream and the oxbow lake as a slice of reality that’s somehow been pinched off, doomed to run an endless loop of existence, over and over. It might be anywhere from a few seconds to years, even centuries. The point is that it’s sealed off from the rest of the Altiverse, no more detectable or accessible than the theoretical universe inside a black hole.

If Lord Dogknife’s sorcerers had somehow managed to open a way to one of these shadow dimensions, they could put a seeming spell on it, make it look like whatever they wanted it to—and then drop us out of it and into one of the HEX worlds. Which was exactly what they’d done. There had been no way for us to detect the trick, either by instrumentation or by Walking. The perfect trap.

But, once opened, that shadow realm was no longer inaccessible. I still remembered how to get there.

I couldn’t go back to InterWorld. I didn’t have that knowledge. Okay, fine.

It didn’t mean I couldn’t start looking for my friends.

I envisioned the coordinates that had taken us into the trap, and, gently, I nudged them open with my mind.

A huge, egglike door dilated several yards in front of me with a low bitter-chocolate-scented screech.

I didn’t go through it. I just watched and waited. After a moment, the door closed once more, and then it shrank to nothing and vanished. Where the door had been, however, was a dark place like a shadow that rippled and flapped like a flag in a thunderstorm.

That was the trapdoor. That was the portal that led to the shadow dimension where they’d taken my team.

That was where I was going.

I Walked toward the shadow door. Before I could enter, however, something was suddenly in the way, bobbing and hanging in space. It was a balloon the size of a large cat, and it was blocking my way.

“Hue,” I said.

Bottle green and neon pink flickered across its surface, as if in warning.

“Hue, I have to go through there.”

Hue’s surface changed, pushed and pulled, and I was looking at something that resembled a balloon caricature of Lady Indigo. Then the image
sproinged
back into a balloon.

“I couldn’t get back there before because you were stopping me, weren’t you?”

A deep affirmative vermilion.

“Look, I
have
to get back there. They may have died a long time ago, or they may have only been put into chains five minutes ago—you know how screwy time can get when you go from world to world—especially these shadow
dimensions. But they were my people. And I took them there. The least I can do is get them out—or die trying.”

He contracted, as if he were thinking. Then he drifted upward and out of my way. He looked a little sad.

“But, hey, if you want to come with me—well, a friend is always good to have around.”

Hue ran through a set of bright colors I don’t think you can see outside of the In-Between and purposefully bounced down to me. He hovered over my left shoulder.

Together we stepped into the shadow.

I was cold then, for a moment, like stepping into a river on a warm day, and then the world shimmered and reformed.

I was up on the roof, in a world which looked like something out of
The Jetsons.
And then Hue floated in front of my face, forming himself into a kind of large lens. I looked at the world through the huge bubbly mudluff, and saw…

…a gray sky. Saw that I was standing on the turret of a sad-looking castle. The whole place felt like an empty stage set, no longer in use. I couldn’t see anyone anywhere around.

“Okay,” I said to Hue. “Let’s go find the dungeons.”

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.