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.
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.