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.
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.