“No. You’ve had your few minutes of moping — now put them behind you and let’s work on getting out of this place and finding that bar you mentioned.”
Shark grunts and faces me, recovering in the blink of an eye. I wish I had skin as thick as his, that I could go from the depths of despair to normality in the space of a few heartbeats. “Are those marbles still working?” he asks.
“I guess.”
“Think you can use them to find this thief of yours?”
“Possibly.”
“Then set the hounds loose, boy — it’s time to kick demonic ass!”
THIEVES
NOTHING happens when I ask the marbles to lead me to the demon thief. So I ask them to find Cadaver instead, and they immediately set off, guiding us through the vastness of space. We’d be lost without the marbles. Impossible to tell up from down in this void. We couldn’t even find our way back to the panels we came through. I wonder if Lord Loss knew about the marbles when he sent us here. Perhaps we have an advantage he didn’t count on.
After what feels like less than a day we come to a pair ofwhite panels. The marbles hesitate, then split, one goingleft, one right. I stop them before they sl
ip through. Glanceat Dervish and Shark for their opinions.
“Looks like it doesn’t matter which way we go,” Dervish says.
“But Cadaver can’t be in two zones at once, can he?”Shark frowns.
“Maybe he’s straddling them,” Dervish suggests. “A foot in each world.”
“Or maybe the marbles are trying to split us up,” Shark says suspiciously. “We don’t know where their power comes from. This might be the work of Lord Loss — he separates us, throws us together, then splits us again.”
“I doubt it,” Dervish says. “Anyway, if that’s the case, it’s easy to outfox him — we just don’t part. We go through one panel together. Kernel, which do you prefer?”
I shrug. “I’ve no idea.”
“Then let’s go left,” Dervish decides. When neither of us objects, he moves to a spot just behind me, Shark slides up in front, and in a close line we follow the marbles through the panel, into a new zone of fresh horrors.
Guts everywhere. Every sort of inner organ imaginable. Stacked in piles, splattered around in pieces, some draping off trees of bone. A foul stench. The ground beneath our feet slippery with blood, mucus and all sorts of slime. I choke from the stench, vomit spewing out of my mouth. Dervish and Shark are the same. All three of us on our knees, vomiting, clutching our noses shut, gasping for air.
Demons are slithering through the mass of guts, ripping them apart, bathing in the blood and goo, feeding greedily. Most are wormlike, some as short as caterpillars, others several feet long. They’re blind. They carry on shredding and guzzling, ignorant of our presence. One slides over the back of my legs, sniffs at me, decides there are richer pickings elsewhere and moves on.
“Magic!” Dervish gasps, eyes red and watery. “Create a...field... like in... the last place!”
It’s hard to focus. The magic doesn’t come easily here. The stench is foul, but it isn’t fatal, so my body doesn’t automatically generate a magical force field. After a minute or two of fumbling, I construct a weak field of air around my face. It’s not as strong as the field I created in space, and some of the smell seeps through, but it blocks out the worst and allows me to breathe normally.
Shark finds it more difficult than Dervish or me. His magic isn’t designed for subtle spells. With Dervish’s help, he manages to create half a field around the front of his face, but it soon flickers out of existence. In the end he curses, rips the left sleeve off his shirt and wraps it around his mouth and nose. For Shark, that’s as good as it’s going to get.
“Let’s backtrack,” Dervish says, nodding at the black panels behind us. “Try the other panel. It can’t be any worse than —”
“Wait,” I stop him. The marbles have darted forward and are hovering above a pile of pink and brown intestines. The guts heave upwards regularly, then subside, as though the pile is breathing. There must be a demon underneath, feasting on the guts, burrowing through them like a rat.
I advance slowly, digging my toes into the soft ground so I don’t slip, only now realizing that it isn’t really ground, simply a floor of guts. Maybe we’re inside the stomach of a huge demon like the sky monster. If so, I hate to think of where we might have to pass through to get out!
I’m almost level with the base of the pile when the guts on top are thrust off. A demon sticks its head out of the mess and happily shakes it hard from side to side. A green head, a cross between a human’s and a dog’s, with long draping ears and wide white eyes.
“Cadaver!” I roar, startling the demon. When his eyes focus on me, he snarls, claws himself out of the pile of guts and scrabbles away across the floor of intestines.
“After him!” Shark yells, words muffled by his mask. He bounds over the pile of guts, slips and slides into a filthy pool of green and brown liquid. Comes up vomiting again, tearing his mask loose, wheezing for air.
Dervish darts to Shark’s aid while I jog after Cadaver, not too fast, knowing it’s better to go slow and keep my feet than speed up and slip as Shark did.
With his long legs and hairy feet — the hairs acting as grips — Cadaver soon pulls away from me, weaving around mounds of guts and leaping over murky, bubbling pools of blood and waste. I don’t worry about losing track of him — the marbles are hot on his trail, obeying my orders, dogging the demon.