He had fought dogs before, on the streets of Hell, and he knew that location was everything. Rather than fight these hounds on the palace steps, badger turned and bolted, heading for the cover of the bushes. As he wheeled around, he saw the palace for the first time in its entirety: a sprawling crimson building, lacquer gleaming like blood, the white marble pillars standing out like stripped bone.
There was a stand of hibiscus at the far end of the grass. The badger made for it, as fast as his short legs would carry him. He felt a hot breath on his hind paws, just as he reached the shelter of the bushes. These plants had spines. Badger was used to that, but he did not think the dogs were. A wailing yell from behind him confirmed this opinion. Badger pushed through the undergrowth, which became increasingly dense, snuffling and snorting, sounding out the ground beneath. Somewhere, there was a hollowness, and this could only be a good thing. But the hounds were not far away; he could hear them whining, running parallel to his own course, presumably on the far side of the bushes. Soon, there would be a place at which they would break through.
And sure enough, it came, just as the badger stumbled out into a small clearing. There was a hole!—badger's spirit soared, but it also meant that the ground was uneven, the hibiscus less dense, and a black scaled head was even now bursting through the scarlet blossoms. It was too close; badger could not risk a leap for the hole and so he turned, growling.
The dog snapped, a teasing play.
"There are four of us, little demon. And only one of you. So we will take it in turns, before we rip you apart."
"I have something to tell you," badger replied. The dog put its great head on one side, the clever, fierce eyes glittering.
"And what might that be?"
"This," the badger said, and sprang. His jaws closed around the dog's nose, biting through the thin scales and rewarded with a scalding spray of blood. The dog screamed. Badger curled up, bringing heavy hind paws under the dog's chin, and tore out its throat. The dog crashed to the ground, just as the others charged through the bushes. Teeth grazed the badger's shoulder, he spun around, snapped, missed, snapped again, and locked molars onto an ear. The dog jerked, frantically.
"Stay still, stupid bitch!" a canine voice instructed. Again, the badger felt the graze of teeth and used the momentum of the dog's own movements to whip to and fro. Up and over, landing on the dog's back and biting through her spine. A dreadful howling filled the clearing, and badger, finally, was in reach of the hole. He jumped, turned, and backed down it, hoping with some desperation that it was deep enough. His last view before the spice of unfamiliar earth swallowed him was of two snarling heads, with the whining ghosts of the slain hounds close behind. But they were too big to fit down the hole. Badger slithered further, wriggling and scraping, turned a bend, and they were out of sight.
Earth. It was not the soil in which he had been born. That had been black and crumbling, a nourishing loam which had brought badger forth, forming him out of its own substance, reaching deep within itself to draw up metals, forging him in the furnace roar, only dim now but still a tumult of light and fire in memory, making him dual-aspected, teakettle and badger. Earth had told him secrets of itself: where it was hollow, where dense, the long, slow stories of stone, the hard, bright tales of metal. Badger, having learned, had then been ejected: spat out onto an immense slope of hillside. Looking up, he had seen the volcanic cone rising behind him: a mountain, a deity, its world-filling presence still recognizing the small spirit of a badger demon, reaching out and down while badger cowered against the ground, wishing earth would swallow him and take him back. The presence, Fujiyama, sweeping over and out and gone and leaving the cone—far larger than its counterpart in the human realm—shining snow-pale against a rosy sky.
He had wandered after that, exploring this new world of over-ground, encountering others, kappa and miko, things that tried to bind him and things that tried to kill him, to dispatch him to the lower levels of this particular Hell. And finally, one had succeeded: badger swept up in a net, a shout of triumph, a sorcerer with bones rattling from his hat who cut badger down and shackled his feet, then took him Elsewhere, fleeing between the worlds to a mansion in China-Below. Several spells later, there was badger: indentured to an august family. He minded, at first, but there was a baby to protect and badger discovered that he did, after all, have a sense of purpose and duty, if not much of a heart.
Mistress. Unprotected, somewhere far away. This would not do. Resolute, badger scrambled around into the narrowing passage. But he could sense that the tunnel went on. Badger started digging.
Distance was easy, time was not. He had traveled some way: a few hundred yards before the tunnel opened out again. There was even a crack of daylight in the ground above, a slot widening into over-ground. Badger was very cautious. These gardens had been made, it was not wild ground, and that meant there was an even greater chance of them being fully known and mapped. He did not want to burst back into the above to find the dogs waiting. He proceeded with great care, smelling, listening, waiting. But he could not scent the dogs and he knew them by now: a rank, musky odor like a long-buried bone, and it occurred to him that this was what they were: summoned up, flesh magicked onto old ivory.
Over-ground was a surprise, when he eventually poked his nose into it. The gardens were gone, or seemed to have done. This was forest: wild, a high canopy filled with chattering, sharp-toothed creatures and flashing birds.
Interesting, thought badger. In his own Hell, distance did not mean very much: it was fluid, mutable, unlike the fixed spans of the human realm. You could turn a corner and find that you had come five hundred miles. From badger's admittedly limited experience, most Hells seemed to be similar. So perhaps he had already come a great distance from the gardens of the tigresses' palace. And perhaps not. Better be careful.
Badger listened, but the only sounds around him were those of this unnatural realm. It was hard to know what to do, other than to begin walking and hope that there would be a portal to somewhere else. All worlds were linked, but only at certain points unless one was particularly gifted in traveling between them: the gods, for instance, were better at this than most people, but one would expect that. Badger, not even a small god, had no such talents. He snorted, and trundled on.