InterWorld (InterWorld 1)

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 re-formed.

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.”

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 beca