The Complete Interworld Trilogy: Interworld; The Silver Dream; Eternity’s Wheel. Нил Гейман

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.

      And then there was one that I’d never seen before, but I knew who he was the minute he entered. He was the biggest man I had ever seen: so big, and so perfectly proportioned that it seemed as if everyone else in the room were no bigger than a little child. He wore black and crimson robes. His body, what I could see of it, was human and muscled like Michelangelo’s David. It was flawless.

      But his face …

      How to describe it? If you ever saw him, you’d never be able to forget him. His face would swim up at you as you began to fall asleep, and you’d wake up screaming.

      Imagine a man who had started to transform into a hyena, like a werewolf turning into a wolf. Imagine him caught halfway through the transformation: his face half snout, his beard half coarse dog hair, his teeth sharp and made for ripping carrion. He had piglike eyes that gleamed red, with horizontal slits, like a ferret’s. A flattened nose and a jaw perpetually twisted into a ghastly parody of a smile.

      He reminded me in a distorted way of pictures I’d seen of Anubis, the jackal-headed Egyptian god who conducted the dead to judgment. Maybe that was a better description, since that was pretty much what he was going to be doing to me.

      But it wasn’t how he looked that promised nightmares. It was the sense of what lay behind that horrible mutated face—the knowledge that, to this thing, this monster, those nightmares were sweet entertainment. They were Mary Poppins–style Disney dances in the park.

      Lord Dogknife smiled at me with sharp, sharp teeth and said, in a voice like honeyed swamp gas, “We were disappointed not to have picked you up in the snare last month, Joseph Harker. Thank you so much for returning.” He turned his hyena head. “You were right, Lady Indigo. The most powerful Walker in a decade. I can smell it. He’ll make fine fuel for the Malefic.”

      He turned back to me, and I nearly screamed as those hideous eyes found me again. “You are fortunate,” he told me. “There is no other ship with the facilities to strip you completely of all extraneous matter, to flense you of flesh and hair and bones and fat, to reduce you to your absolute essentials: the power that lets you Walk from world to world, which is the power that lets us travel the Nowhere-at-All. No other ship but the Malefic.