Spelunking Through Hell, page 21
“They don’t have a lot of resistance, so they can pass through the membrane easily,” I said.
“Precisely. Meaning that when a snake cult manages to summon one, they can harvest the membrane that has adhered to their new ‘god’ and use it to do great things. Pure pneuma is one of the most powerful magical tools there is. A dimensional traveler should be dripping with it. Especially one who’s been pushing through membranes for fifty years.” He paused, clearly expecting me to pick up on the thread of what he was saying.
I’ve never been a fan of picking up on threads. If you can’t punch through something or blow it up, what’s the point? I looked at him blankly for a long moment before shaking my head. “Okay.”
He looked confused by my lack of curiosity, then shrugged and said, “You should be. And you’re not.”
“What?” I looked at my arm, like I would somehow be able to see the dimensional membrane that had never been visible before. “Not at all?”
“Oh, you have quite a bit adhering to you now, and I’ll peel it away later, with your permission, to add to the standing effects. We’ll be able to run the translation spell for longer than I thought. But, Alice, you don’t have fifty years’ worth. You could have been keying your tattoos to the pneuma you were harvesting just by moving between dimensions.” He looked at me gravely. “You could have set up your own anti-aging tattoos.”
I blinked slowly. It sounded like he was saying that it had never been necessary to flense me; like the energy generated by my travels would have been enough to do the same thing with substantially less trauma. But that couldn’t be true. Naga had been helping me. Naga had been making sure I was put back together every time things went wrong, supplying me with maps and directions and bounties to collect while I’d been out there anyway, and . . .
“So every time they skinned me, it peeled off the pneuma?” I asked slowly, feeling out the words.
“Yes,” said Thomas. “Every time. After fifty years, you should be carrying enough of a magical charge to power a continent. Or destroy one. Right now, you’ve got enough of it stuck to you to destroy a city, not crack a world in two.”
“Naga . . . told me . . . he said there were no worlds capable of supporting human life in this direction,” I said, still speaking slowly and deliberately. It felt like I was standing on the edge of a cliff that had started to crumble under my feet, throwing everything I thought I knew into disarray. “I tried to come this way more than forty years ago, and he said no. He said I’d never survive. He said there was nothing here to find.”
My heart was beating too fast, and my chest was getting tight, making it more and more difficult for me to breathe. I stared at Thomas, but I wasn’t really seeing him anymore. I was seeing the cracks in my relationship with Naga, the places where the things he’d told me and the things I’d been going through hadn’t quite matched up, all the things that had never made sense.
The questions I should have asked—the questions Helen said I had asked but didn’t remember asking. His personal Johrlac took my pain away every time they laid me down and covered my skin in new ink. What else had they been taking away? And for how long?
“He lied to me,” I said wonderingly. Thomas reached over and pushed my hair back from my face.
“Yes, darling, I’m afraid he did,” he said. Then, with more alarm: “Alice? Are you all right?”
It was getting harder to keep breathing. I dug my hands into the blankets, balling them into fists, and bent forward to stare at my own knees, shaking. I was distantly aware that I was having a panic attack but had no idea how to make it stop.
Thomas got off the bed. I grabbed for his hand, suddenly certain that if he left my sight, he’d be gone again, and I’d have to start looking for him from the beginning. Gently, he extricated himself and leaned over to kiss the top of my head. “I’ll be right back,” he said. “You have my word. I’ve made no further bargains, and even if I had, I have a snake to kill, meaning I can’t go off to get abducted by cosmic forces of ultimate evil right now. Stay here, all right?”
I couldn’t have moved if I’d wanted to. I managed to nod, barely, and dug my fingers into the covers again as he walked away, breathing faster and faster.
Naga had been lying to me. Naga had been lying to me. This could have been over decades ago. I could have gone home to my children while they were still children, I could have been a part of their lives, I could have saved my family, I could—
I could hear the click of the window being opened, and the snick of small shears. Then Thomas sat back down on the edge of the bed, and said, voice reasonable and very distant, “I want to give you something to calm you down. Do I have your permission?”
I still couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t even nod anymore. Everything was crashing down on top of me, walls eroded by relief and finally feeling like I could relax. How much damage had I done to myself in the process of running? How much of it could have been avoided?
“Oh, Alice . . .” Thomas put his arm around me, drawing me up against his body. “If I wasn’t already convinced, this would convince me. I never wanted to see you fall apart like this again. But it’s not something you can fake. Here. Please.”
Carefully, he peeled the fingers of my right hand away from the snarl of blankets, lifting it in his own. I didn’t try pull free, not even as he turned my palm upward and pressed the long, thorny stem of a swamp bromeliad into it, not quite hard enough for the thorns to break my skin. He gave me an expectant look and relaxed slightly as I curled my fingers closed around the stem, driving the thorns into my own flesh.
As always with swamp bromeliads, they were wickedly sharp, but so thin I barely felt them entering me as I slowly turned the flower toward my face and inhaled the smell of apples and strawberries. A wave of exhaustion swept over me, accompanied by a loosening in the bands around my chest, and I toppled gently over into the bed.
Thomas was still there, stroking my hair and watching me with open, obvious concern.
“Rest, love,” he said. “Just . . . get some rest. I’ll be here when you wake up.”
You better be, I thought but couldn’t quite say as my eyes drifted shut and I drifted off to sleep, soothed by the familiar, soporific scent of swamp bromeliads and sweat. It smelled like home. I inhaled deeply, and I was gone, slipping into the comfortable dark of peace.
Thirteen
“I only ever wanted to get her clear of the blast radius before the bomb went off. Was that so much for a father to ask?”
—Jonathan Healy
Still in the same bed, still naked, and somewhat tragically alone, because sometimes the world isn’t fair
He wasn’t.
There, I mean. I opened my eyes on an empty room, the light coming through the vine-clogged window much dimmer and more diffuse, the flower still in my hand, wilted from the lack of water, but otherwise fully intact. I hadn’t rolled or thrashed in my sleep. I sat up slowly, groggy and still faintly sedated by the lingering effects of the sap. Swamp bromeliads are carnivorous plants, and they eat larger prey than most of their kind. They can do that primarily because their sap is one of the best sedatives I’ve ever encountered. It seems to work on everything with a circulatory system, and it has no real negative side effects. I probably shouldn’t think about operating heavy machinery for an hour or two, but I hadn’t been planning on doing that anyway.
“Thomas?” I knew I was speaking to no one but myself even before I opened my mouth. There’s something in the quality of the air that tells you when you’re alone. Uncurling my fingers from the half-crushed stem, I dropped the flower on the bed and stood, shaky and dizzy but functional . . . and grateful, honestly. If I’d woken up alone when I wasn’t drugged, I would probably have lost my shit.
My guns and my bag were where I’d left them, and something new had appeared: my clothing, boots and all, was piled on the chair by the door, neatly folded and clean, with my weapons in a tidy stack off to one side. There was also a tray with a few covered dishes, and a pitcher and basin with a washcloth and towel beside it. It was hard not to take that as some sort of hint. I teetered over to it, too drugged to be offended, and gave myself a quick cold-water scrub-down.
The cold water was enough to clear some of the fog from my head, and the fact that I was alone suddenly seemed a lot more alarming. Food was the last thing on my mind, and my stomach was in a tight enough knot that I wasn’t sure I could have eaten if I’d wanted to. I dropped the washcloth onto the tray and toweled myself briskly dry before turning to my clothes.
There’s a security in properly fitted boots and support garments, a feeling of comfort in knowing that I could run if I had to. Maybe that feeling would fade once I made it home with Thomas by my side, and once I talked Thomas out of killing Naga, who might have been less honest with me than he could have been, but had still been helping me, keeping me alive long enough for me to get here.
I felt even better once I had my boots on and laced and my knives secreted around my body, their weight comforting against my skin. I finished by strapping my holster around my hips and pulling the chain that held my wedding ring and Mama’s engagement ring out of a side pocket. I didn’t always wear it, out of fear of losing them, but it should be safe enough here, at least for the moment. I fastened it behind my neck, shook out my hair, and wiped the last stinging remnants of bromeliad sap off on my shorts before turning for the door.
It wasn’t locked. I was grateful for that. Waking up alone in a locked room might have been enough to convince me that everything from reaching the throne room of the Autarch on had been a dream, and I had just fallen into a nest of Johrlac or something similar. As it stood, I was unhappy to have woken up alone, but I wasn’t doubting my memories.
Yet. That would come. The thing that didn’t make sense to me was why, if Naga had been sending me the wrong way for such a long time on purpose, he had finally helped me go in the right direction. For him to have been intentionally misleading me, he would have needed to know where Thomas was all along, and if that was the case, then he’d been a fool to finally let me head in the right direction. It didn’t add up.
But then, the crossroads hadn’t been dead before I started this particular leg of my journey. And I hadn’t told him they were gone. I’d been so focused on getting started that it just hadn’t come up. Maybe their absence changed things somehow, made this all possible when it really wouldn’t have been before. Maybe the situation was different.
And I’d had the map. The map, which changed everything I thought I knew about this end of the dimensional network, and which made it possible for me to make a solid case for heading in one direction over another. I was ascribing malice where there probably wasn’t any. Naga was my friend, had been since I was a child. He might not always think like a human did, but that didn’t mean he was going to hurt me.
Mammals and reptiles are different, that’s all. I stepped into the short hallway, following it quickly to its end, and paused to listen; unfortunately, the door was too thick for me to tell if anyone was out there. Gingerly, I eased the door partially open and peeked into the room.
Sally was sitting on the short step in front of the throne, which was positioned so as to block my view of the occupant, if there was any. From the angle of her head and the fact that I could hear her talking now that the door was open, I was guessing that there was. I slipped through the door, easing it shut behind me, and walked forward, keeping my hands carefully visible.
I had made it about six feet before Sally noticed me and stiffened, rising. I held up my hands so she could see that they were empty, but I kept on coming.
“You,” she said, tone utterly flat.
“Yeah,” I said. “Do I need to apologize again? I didn’t mean to be a bad guest and hit you.”
“Yes, you did,” she countered. “You hit me very intentionally. I was there.”
“All right, yes, I hit you on purpose, but you took all my stuff, and then you called me names and said I wasn’t believably myself, so you can probably understand why I was a little cranky at the time.”
“I still don’t think—”
“Sally.” Thomas stood, coming into view. He was dressed again—pity, that—in essentially the same thing he’d been wearing before. I wondered whether he’d remembered to pack more weapons this time. I’d been too distracted by the novelty of undressing him after fifty years to really pause and count the knives, but he’d been carrying far fewer than I would have expected. “We’ve discussed this. I have verified her identity to my own satisfaction, and if that was sufficient for me, who knows her best, it can be sufficient for you as well.”
“Yup, you said that the woman who looks almost exactly like your dead wife did when she was a college student is somehow actually your dead wife, who I would like to remind you would be an octogenarian at this point, if she weren’t, you know, super dead, and then you smiled too much and walked around like a man who’d just gotten laid for the first time in fifty years, so you’ll forgive me if I’m not really trusting your judgment right now.” She flipped her hair, folded her arms, and tried to glare at us both at the same time.
I stopped where I was, lowering my hands. I didn’t want to seem like a threat. I was absolutely a threat. No question of that. Instead of pressing the issue of why I’d hit her, and why I’d been justified to do so, I looked to Thomas and said, “I woke up and you were gone. Where did you go?”
“Matters arose which required my attention,” said Thomas regretfully. “I would rather have been there. I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, and while he may or may not be your long-lost husband, he’s still the Autarch here, in case you hadn’t noticed,” said Sally. “There are hundreds of people who need him. I want to see you tell them you’ve come to steal him off to another dimension because you ‘need him more.’ I’d like to see you try.”
“I don’t think you want to get into that pissing contest with me,” I said, voice gone low and tight. “No one wins if we start that. A lot of people lose a lot of blood, and we never figure out how to live with each other. And surprise, you’re gonna have to figure out how to live with me. No matter what happens from here, you’re going to be putting up with me for a while.”
“Lot of assumptions in that,” she said, almost casually.
I paused to consider how angry Thomas was likely to be if I broke his lieutenant. Sadly, “very” was the most likely outcome I could think of. People don’t like to follow reunions with assault. “I know I am who I claim to be. Whether you believe that I’ve proven myself to my husband or not, I know I’m telling the truth, and that matters more than whatever you think of me. I also know, because I know the man I married—maybe not all the details of who he is right now, but the essential core of the man—that there’s no way he’s going to leave all the people he’s promised to protect just because I show up and say that it’s time to go home. So either we’re all getting out of here together, or we’re not getting out of here at all.”
Judging from the look of profound relief that spread over Thomas’ face, I had just identified and shortcut an awkward conversation that he hadn’t been much looking forward to having with me, yet it only made sense. His loyalty was one of the best things about him. Not the first thing to catch my eye—I’d been a hormonal teenager in a small town, and he’d been the exciting stranger who moved into a house near my woods and made my father angry just by existing. Honestly, the rest had been a bonus to the fact that he made my father want to lock me in my room until I died.
We were both different people now than we had been before. I wasn’t deluded enough to think that things were going to go back to the way they had always been, or that we could just go home and pick up where we’d left off. But just the fact that he’d still been wearing his wedding ring told me that he was still the patient, loyal man I’d married.
“What?” Sally blinked, glancing back at Thomas. “But you have kids. He told me—”
“Okay, wow, sexist much, assuming that he’d be willing to abandon the kids and I never would, just because I’m their mother? I genuinely think he’d have been a better parent if our situations had been reversed. More, it was fifty years ago. We don’t have kids anymore; we have adults who happen to be related to us. We’re on the verge of not having grandkids, either, since they’re all grown up.”
Thomas looked a little disappointed at that. I guess he’d been more excited about the opportunity to be a grandpa than I’d expected. Well, he’d be thrilled when I told him about Annie, and how much training she was going to need. We didn’t have another adult sorcerer around, unless they’d managed to find one after I left, and I somehow doubted that.
Squaring my shoulders, I walked past Sally to stand next to Thomas, leaning over to kiss him on the cheek. “Next time, wake me up,” I said.
He gave me a sidelong look, raising an eyebrow. “I expected you to be angrier about being drugged,” he confessed.
“Normally I would be, but under the circumstances . . .” I shook my head. “You asked, and I consented. Bromeliad sap was the easiest way to calm me down, and I’m not going to blame you for taking care of me. Although I am going to ask why you’ve decided to start your gardening with swamp bromeliads. They seem like a dangerous begonia.”
“They have medicinal applications,” said Thomas. “We could all use a little help sleeping sometimes.”
“How did you get them? Is this where they come from?” Not everything on Earth that science hasn’t managed to nail down comes from another dimension, but a lot of the things that seem to have evolved according to a slightly different set of rules originated on the other side of the membrane. It makes for an interesting attempt to chart evolution across multiple worlds at the same time, and a nice headache for the traveling naturalist.
