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On the other side of the flames, the guard, who was still standing, and the various creepies were regrouping and staring at us and talking. We didn’t have surprise on our side any longer. We had to move, one way or another.
Josef shrugged. Then he spat on his hands, reached down and heaved. The muscles on the side of his neck bulged. He grunted with the strain, and then moved back. The outline of a hatch was visible, where the grill met the wall. He grinned, then he slammed it with his massive foot, hard.
There was now a hatch-sized hole in the wall.
“Spells are one thing,” he said. “Brute force is another. Let’s go.”
Those of us who had no weapons pulled them from the wall of the rendering room. I paused and picked up a small leather sack, filled with some kind of powder, that was hanging on the wall.
“What’s that?” asked J/O.
“No idea,” I said. “But my guess is it’s the stuff they were throwing on the fire. Some kind of gunpowder. It couldn’t hurt.”
He made a face. “I don’t think it’s gunpowder. It’s some weird magical stuff. Eye of newt or whatever. You’d better leave it here.”
That decided me. I thrust the pouch into my pocket, and then we went through the hole, down a narrow passage hardly bigger than a ventilation shaft.
J/O was in the lead, and Jakon brought up the rear. The rest of us did the best we could in the middle, blundering into one another in the dark.
“You took your time,” said Jo. I heard feathers rustle as she hunched her wings together.
“I came as soon as I could. What happened to all of you?”
“They took us to a sort of a prison place,” said J/O. “We were in individual cells. We weren’t allowed to talk to anyone, read or anything. And the food—yechh. I found a bug in mine.”
“The bugs were the best part,” said Jakon. “They didn’t even bother to interrogate us. It was pretty obvious we were for the pot.” She hesitated, and I sensed her shivering in the dark. “I met Lord Dogknife. He said we’d suffer, that he’d see to it.”
I remembered that hideous goblin face smiling at me. “He said the same thing to me,” I told them. “It makes for maximum fuel efficiency.” I was glad no one could see my face in the dark.
“We hoped you would come back for us,” Jo said, “or that you’d get back to InterWorld and they would send out a search and rescue party. But as the weeks went by and you didn’t come, we started to lose hope. And when they took us to HEX Prime and put us on the Malefic, I think we all knew we were dead meat.”
I briefly explained what had happened—how HEX had used a shadow realm to throw us off the trail and how I’d been mustered out and mind wiped, only to regain my memory, thanks to Hue. Just about the time I finished, J/O said he saw light ahead.
It took another ten minutes of walking before the rest of us saw it—J/O’s cybervision was much more sensitive to light than ordinary eyes. But eventually we all came out of the tunnel and into the light, and stared down in awe.
We stood on a mezzanine overlooking what had to be the engine room. I’m still not sure how the Malefic flew, but if sheer size counts for anything, the engines had power to spare. They were gigantic. The chamber must have taken up the entire lowest level of the ship. Below us were enormous pistons and valves and rotating gears as big as the city rotunda back in Greenville. Steam shot from huge petcocks, and bus bars slammed together with deafening clangs. It reminded me of pictures I’d seen of the engine rooms on old ocean liners like Titanic—only those ships didn’t have trolls and goblins tending the machinery.
Then Jai touched my arm and pointed to one side. I turned, and saw what was powering the engines: a huge
wall stacked floor to ceiling with what looked like large apothecary jars, or old-fashioned apple cider bottles, made of thick glass. In each of them was what looked like the glow of a firefly, without the firefly—a gentle luminescence that pulsed slightly in rhythm with the pounding machinery. They came in many colors, from firefly green to fluorescent yellows and oranges and eye-popping purples. A tube went up from the top of each jar to a huge pipe in the ceiling, which went down to the center of the engine.
“These are our brothers,” whispered Jai.
“And sisters,” added Jakon.
I touched the side of one cold jar with my hand, and it glowed a bright orange at my touch, as if it recognized me. Inside these jars was the fuel that drove the dreadnought: the essence of Walkers like me, disembodied, bottled and enslaved.
The glass, or whatever material it was, seemed to vibrate slightly. All I could think of was that scene from a hundred different horror movies, in which someone who’s been possessed has a moment of sanity and pleads, “Kill me!”
“That could have been us,” growled Jakon.
“It still could be,” rumbled Josef.
“It’s an abomination,” said Jo. “I wish there was something we could do for them.”
“There is,” said Jai. His mouth was an angry line. Jai had always seemed so gentle. Now I could feel his anger in the air, like static before a thunderstorm.
He furrowed his brow and stared at a glass jar far above us. I thought I saw it shiver. Jai concentrated harder, closing his eyes—and the jar shattered, exploding with a pop! like a firecracker. A light hung in the air where the jar had been, edging nervously about, as if it were unused to freedom.
