in the back of my head, a voice like gas wheezing through honey was saying, “We are ready to begin the assault on the Lorimare worlds. The phantom gateways we will be creating will make a counterattack or rescue impossible. When they are empowered, the usual Lorimare coordinates will then open notional shadow realms under our control. Now, with another fine Harker at our disposal, we will have all the power we need to send in the fleet. The Imperator of the Lorimare worlds is already one of ours.…”
Lord Dogknife’s words had meant nothing when I had heard them originally, coming from the mouth of Scarabus—they had just been one more thing among entirely too many things that I didn’t understand. But now, in the light of everything that had occurred, they made perfect—and horrifying—sense.
Phantom gateways, leading to notional shadow realms. Yes.
Shadow realms, like the one that six kids, heading out to find three beacons on a training mission, wound up in. We thought we were going to one of the Lorimare worlds, and instead we wound up in a shadow dimension. The concept had been touched on as a theoretical possibility in one of the classes at Base Town: They were also known as “oxbow worlds,” named after the oddly shaped lakes that were sometimes left when a meandering river cuts off a section of itself. Think of the river as a time stream and the oxbow lake as a slice of reality that’s somehow been pinched off, doomed to run an endless loop of existence, over and over. It might be anywhere from a few seconds to years, even centuries. The point is that it’s sealed off from the rest of the Altiverse, no more detectable or accessible than the theoretical universe inside a black hole.
If Lord Dogknife’s sorcerers had somehow managed to open a way to one of these shadow dimensions, they could put a seeming spell on it, make it look like whatever they wanted it to—and then drop us out of it and into one of the HEX worlds. Which was exactly what they’d done. There had been no way for us to detect the trick, either by instrumentation or by Walking. The perfect trap.
But, once opened, that shadow realm was no longer inaccessible. I still remembered how to get there.
I couldn’t go back to InterWorld. I didn’t have that knowledge. Okay, fine.
It didn’t mean I couldn’t start looking for my friends.
I envisioned the coordinates that had taken us into the trap, and, gently, I nudged them open with my mind.
A huge, egglike door dilated several yards in front of me with a low bitter-chocolate-scented screech.
I didn’t go through it. I just watched and waited. After a moment, the door closed once more, and then it shrank to nothing and vanished. Where the door had been, however, was a dark place like a shadow that rippled and flapped like a flag in a thunderstorm.
That was the trapdoor. That was the portal that led to the shadow dimension where they’d taken my team.
That was where I was going.
I Walked toward the shadow door. Before I could enter, however, something was suddenly in the way, bobbing and hanging in space. It was a balloon the size of a large cat, and it was blocking my way.
“Hue,” I said.
Bottle green and neon pink flickered across its surface, as if in warning.
“Hue, I have to go through there.”
Hue’s surface changed, pushed and pulled, and I was looking at something that resembled a balloon caricature of Lady Indigo. Then the image sproinged back into a balloon.
“I couldn’t get back there before because you were stopping me, weren’t you?”
A deep affirmative vermilion.
“Look, I have to get back there. They may have died a long time ago, or they may have only been put into chains five minutes ago—you know how screwy time can get when you go from world to world—especially these shadow dimensions. But they were my people. And I took them there. The least I can do is get them out—or die trying.”
He contracted, as if he were thinking. Then he drifted upward and out of my way. He looked a little sad.
“But, hey, if you want to come with me—well, a friend is always good to have around.”
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.”
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
