InterWorld (InterWorld 1)

use 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.