InterWorld (InterWorld 1)

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 st

upid.

“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.