InterWorld (InterWorld 1)

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 that 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.”