Spelunking Through Hell, page 30
“We need to go join the effort to gather my subjects, and your ribs—”
“I know both those things, and I know we’ve both been alone for fifty years, no matter how many people we had near us, and I know you need to be close to me as much as I need to be close to you. Much as I don’t like it, I’m okay not making out like teenagers behind the Red Angel while my ribs hurt this much, but I want to hold you for a little while, and you’re going to let me. You can’t go to the front line, and they’re not counting on me yet.” I let go of his hand and pulled my hand away, leaving him looking momentarily bereft at the loss of contact before I spread my arms and said, “Just get over here.”
He sighed as he climbed onto the bed beside me, and we wrapped our arms around each other and lay down, still fully clothed, with our heads against the pillow.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hello,” he replied, with faint amusement. “Are we returning to introductions?”
“Not nearly enough mud for that,” I said. “But I’d be happy to keep meeting you over and over again, for the rest of my life, if that was one of my options. You talked a lot, but I’m not completely sure you answered my question.”
He sighed heavily. “My apologies. I . . . yes. Yes, Alice. Yes, if they won’t all agree to come inside and let me try to save them, if they must persist in making war when we should be making peace with one another, then yes. I’ll leave them here, and I’ll come home with you.”
“And Sally.”
“And Sally,” he agreed. “You were telling the truth when you told her that you’d spoken to James, yes? I don’t know how she’ll react if you were lying, and that’s a fight I’d rather not have to witness.”
“I can’t say for sure that he’s her James,” I admitted. “Maybe there’s a bunch of boys named James who fit that story. But that seems a little unlikely, and everything I said about the boy I met was true. He’s from Maine, the crossroads took his best friend, he’s a sorcerer, and he’s with our granddaughter. She’ll keep him alive until we get home with Sally.”
Thomas sighed, an almost imperceptible worry leaving his eyes. I hadn’t realized it was there until it was gone.
“You care about her a lot,” I said.
“She’s the closest thing I’ve had to family in a very long time,” he said. “I would have been able to understand the reasons for your falsehood, if you had been lying, but I would prefer not to see her hurt.”
“Nope,” I said. “Not lying. About anything, including being okay with the fact that you’ve apparently adopted a teenage girl who doesn’t like me very much. We’re going home, Thomas. I have faith in us.”
“It’s an impossible task you’re asking me to achieve,” he said. “You want me to work a kind of magic that’s never been done before, with limited resources, without exhausting myself so severely that we simply wind up stranded in whatever dimension we’re spilled out into.”
“I know,” I said. “But like I said, I have faith in you.” I closed my eyes, exhaling, allowing myself to relax into the bed. It was a decent enough bed. Not up to the standards I was used to back on Earth, but for something scavenged in a desolate hell world, it was pretty good.
Slowly, as if he was afraid of somehow overstepping, Thomas tightened his arms around me and pulled me closer, until my forehead was pressed lightly to his chest, and I could hear the long-missed familiar rhythm of his heartbeat. Tangled up and keeping close, I sighed, and pulled myself closer still.
It had been a long, hard day for both of us—a long, hard decade, really—and it was no surprise when we fell asleep, not letting go.
* * *
“Boss?” The voice was Sally’s, breaking through my fuzzy, somewhat disoriented dreams like an ice pick and shocking me back into wakefulness at the same time as I heard the door slam open. She sounded alarmed.
That wasn’t a good sign. I pushed myself away from Thomas, distantly relieved that this time he’d still been there when it had been time for me to wake up, and shoved myself into a sitting position, already fully awake as I turned to face her.
“Knock,” I recommended in a cold voice. Then: “What is it?”
She wasn’t bleeding and had no new visible injuries. Her eyes were a little wild, and her spear was wet with what looked more like maple syrup than blood, but apart from that, she could have just been waking us up to prove that she could.
“They’re in,” she said, sagging and leaning against the spear for support. She was panting. The sudden urge to get her a cookie and a place to sit was almost overwhelming. “All of them. They’re in.”
Thomas was sitting up, blearier than I was, but still waking quickly enough that we probably wouldn’t be dead if Sally had been something dangerous. “It’s done?”
“All of them who were willing to come,” she said. “The O’Vera and another contingent of Haspers attacked while we were still getting the last of our people inside. We lost over a dozen men. Our attackers lost a hell of a lot more. They’re hungry, and dehydrated, and so tired it’s almost criminal. I’m surprised they were able to march on us in the first place.”
As I had almost expected, a look of brief, biting guilt flashed across Thomas’ face. He wasn’t responsible for the death of this world, but he had still hastened its decay on some level by siphoning away the pneuma attached to the new arrivals, keeping it from dissolving normally and entering the atmosphere. Without him, this place might have had a few more years. Of course, the people here had spent all the years up until now preying on each other, and without him, there would have been no haven for the people who weren’t interested in violence and rapine, but there was no way to know.
There was no way to know any of this. I elbowed him lightly. “Hey. You offered them safety. They chose to stay outside and keep attacking each other. That’s not on you.”
“Listen to the lady who hauled you off for naptime when we needed you,” said Sally. “This isn’t your fault. Hey, lady.”
“Alice,” I said mildly. “The name is Alice.”
“So you keep saying. These friends of yours. When are they supposed to show up?”
I wasn’t really interested in having this conversation again. “Whenever they do,” I said. “I can’t exactly call them and ask where they are. Presumably, they’re somewhere between here and Ithaca. I don’t think we can wait for them.”
“So we’re fucked, is what you’re telling me,” said Sally, straightening. “You came here to get everybody’s hopes up, and now we’re all going to die even faster than we were before. I’m sorry, boss, it doesn’t matter how much she looks or talks or acts—or fucks—like your dead wife, she’s not her, and she never was. She’s a trap laid by the crossroads. And we both fell into it.”
This again? I stared at her before turning, slowly, to look at Thomas. He was watching me, visibly worried.
“You can’t think she’s serious,” I said. “You have to be smarter than that. Come on, honey, you know me. You know there’s no chance the crossroads could mimic me well enough to fool you for more than a minute once we were both awake and actually talking to each other.”
“I know Mary was there almost as soon as Alice Healy was born, arms out, ready to take her charge,” he said slowly. “I know there’s never been a living person the crossroads knew better than they knew my wife. I know that if they wanted to, they could make her in perfect replica, craft or steal a body, change it to suit whatever they needed it to be . . . maybe even shove poor Mary’s ghost inside. Torture us both at the same time to punish her for keeping me out of their clutches as long as she did.” Then he looked to Sally. “But I also know that if they were laying a trap to convince me, they wouldn’t have had her come here and tell me she’d been getting flensed alive by someone she trusted for fifty years in order to stay in one piece long enough to get to me. They would have found something less immediately alarming to explain her presence. Something less likely to cause me to lose my temper.”
I sagged in sudden relief, and only Sally’s presence kept me from grabbing and kissing him like it was going to be the last time. Instead, I turned to her and said, coolly, “Believe me or not, but I am who I say I am, I’m not going anywhere, and we’re all getting out of here.”
“Without your friends.”
Thomas slid off the bed and stood. “There may be a way,” he said. “Alice has been traveling through dimensions via artificial means, causing even more disruption to the dimensional membrane, and hence the pneuma, than the norm. When she told me how she’d been rejuvenating herself for all this time, she caused me to actually assess the levels clinging to her skin. She’s been having it removed regularly, but even with only this trip to fuel her, she had to cross dozens of barriers to get here. She currently has enough pneuma on her for ten people. I’ve long suspected that the crossroads metered out the arrivals of our newcomers to keep them from revitalizing the world sufficiently to make it a pleasant place to live. They’ve never allowed us this much at one time.”
“So, what—you think you can scrape it off her and use it to open a door?”
“I think the word ‘open’ might be overly generous in that sentence, as opening something implies it can be closed again,” he said. He looked at me, lips pressed into a thin line. “This will hurt. Not as much as your customary means of removal, since you’ll keep your skin, but quite a bit all the same. And I’ve never moved this much pneuma at one time. There could be unexpected side effects.”
“You have my full consent to pull my pin and chuck me like a grenade at the wall of the universe so that we can all blast our way the fuck out of here,” I said cheerfully, sliding to my feet. “I can take a little pain, and it’s not like I can use all this pneuma for anything.” And it wasn’t like he was going to let me carry it back to Naga the way I’d been doing.
And it wasn’t like I particularly wanted to, either. I’d always gone running obediently back before this, but Thomas’ horror over the idea of me being skinned was enough to make me wonder if the little telepathic helpers who’d always been there to ease the post-treatment pain might not have been flipping a few switches while they were inside my head, keeping me from getting as alarmed as I really should have been. It would be so easy for a Johrlac to implant a few subconscious impulses and commands. It was already clear that they’d been messing with my memory, enough to remove important pieces of information about the way the whole system worked, all without leaving holes for me to recognize and investigate.
I’d have to ask Sarah to check my head when we got home. She didn’t like reading my thoughts—something about the level of single-minded obsession that had driven me through the last five decades being overwhelming, which Antimony said was a polite way of saying, “Your brain is a sack of broken glass, and she’s afraid she’ll cut herself”—but she’d do it if I asked her to. Better to know.
Thomas sighed. “I know you have a pain tolerance worthy of dedicated scholarship,” he said. “I just wish you hadn’t needed it, and I have no desire to be the one to hurt you.”
Sally rolled her eyes like any teenager confronted with the thought that her father was attracted to someone, and I was reminded that while right now, she might look a few years older than me, she was actually the age she seemed: she was so terribly young, barely out of childhood when the crossroads took her. They always did appreciate an opportunity to prey on the young.
“If you two are done, I need to know the plan,” she said.
Thomas took a deep breath. “We’ll do this in the throne room,” he said. “I’ll need as much space as possible, and everyone should be as close as they can be. That’s the only space we have that can hold us all. Sally, tell the guards to round everyone up, and warn anyone with children that they’ll probably want to bring something to block out the screams. This is going to be brutal.”
I didn’t like his tone when he said that. Still, I shrugged, and said, “Works for me. Sally?”
“On it, boss,” she said, and turned for the door.
“Wait,” said Thomas. She glanced back. “Tell them to bring anything they’re interested in keeping. I don’t know how much stuff we’ll be able to carry with us, but based on our individual arrivals here, and Alice’s supplies, whatever we can carry will make the transit.”
“All right,” she said, slipping out of the room and leaving us alone.
I looked gravely at Thomas. He seemed too worried for what I understood of the situation, which admittedly wasn’t as much as I would have liked. “Hey,” I said softly. “Hey.”
He focused on me. “Yes?”
“What are you so worried about? You’ve gathered everyone who’s willing to be saved. You’ve kept these people alive as long as you possibly could, and you’ve done a better job than anyone could have asked of you. We have one more thing to do, and then we get to rest. We get to go home, and we get to rest.”
He laughed, soft and bitter. “I’m not sure I remember how to do that anymore.”
“Neither do I. So we’ll learn a new way of resting, together, and that’ll be nice for both of us.”
“Alice . . . this isn’t something I’ve ever done before. This isn’t something I think anyone has ever done before. What if Naga has been torturing you because it was the only way to remove the pneuma without . . . without killing you in the process?”
“Then I die.” I shrugged. “I’ve been running on borrowed time since you sold yourself to the crossroads to save me. I’d rather not die when it looks like we’re finally going to be together, but it’s not like I didn’t know what I was doing when I threw myself into a killing jar looking for my missing husband. And I’d rather you didn’t have to live believing that you’re the reason I’m gone, but that’s because you wouldn’t be. If this kills me, blame the crossroads. This is all their fault. They should never have accepted the bargain you offered them in the first place. But because they did, we got Kevin, and Jane, and all the grandchildren, and a few good years together.”
He smiled. “They were good, weren’t they? I haven’t just been lying to myself to make this all seem like it was worth it?”
“They were the best.” I took his hand, raised it to my lips, and kissed his knuckles. “If this is how I die, it’s okay. I give you permission to do whatever you have to do to save as many of these people as you possibly can, and to forgive yourself after it’s over. Not that I think you will. You’ve never been great at forgiving yourself.”
“Neither have you.”
“Takes one to know one,” I said. He grabbed me then, yanking me toward him, and kissed me like he was kissing me for the first time and the last time and every time in between all at once. He kissed me like he was never going to kiss me or anyone else again. When he stepped away, staring at me wonderingly, I was still holding his hand. I smiled at him, squeezed his fingers, and finally did something I’d been trying not to do for fifty years. I finally let go.
It was time to end this.
Nineteen
“Your daughter will do amazing things, but you will never see them. I’m so sorry, Fran.”
—Juniper Campbell
Stepping into the Autarch’s throne room, preparing to get the hell out of this terrible, dying dimension
All the people Sally and the guard had herded into the throne room looked bad, although the Murrays were the worst. Even compared to the others, they were malnourished and dehydrated, visibly unwell. They held themselves in rigid groups, clearly mistrustful of everyone around them, clearly scared out of their wits. Thomas’ people also stood apart, but they were easy to find; they were the ones who looked like they’d been eating regularly, even if not all of them had been eating enough, or who had clean faces, or small animals accompanying them. A little boy of what I’d guess to be around five, with horns and bright blue skin, clutched a chicken against his chest like it was the only good thing left in the world. The chicken, which was also blue, didn’t seem to mind.
They all murmured when the two of us emerged into the room. Thomas kissed me on the forehead. “Go to the throne,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”
Then he turned and made for the door, vanishing into the hall with Sally close behind him. I walked to the throne as instructed, shrugging off my pack and placing it at the foot before flopping onto the cushion. The gasp from several of his guards was remarkably satisfying. I smiled sweetly at them and leaned back into the cushions, trying to relax.
It wasn’t happening. Thomas was distressed enough to keep me on edge, even if I hadn’t been steeling myself against the promised pain. Things always hurt more when you have time to anticipate them, and right now, I had nothing but time. I closed my eyes, shutting out the rest of the room, and listened to the rustle of bodies, the shuffle of feet. There were more people here than I could count, but definitely fewer than three hundred. It was so much larger of a group than I’d been expecting, but probably less than Thomas had been hoping for, given the size of his territory’s population. It was all too much.
Too bad we didn’t have a Johrlac. They could probably wave their hands and work some complicated math and just pop us out of here like popping the yolk out of a boiled egg, smooth and easy. A true Johrlac, anyway. A cuckoo couldn’t do it. The Johrlac we have back on Earth have been stunted somehow by their lack of exposure to the dimensional hive mind that controls all of Johrlar and guides the rest of them. I don’t pretend to understand it. I’m not sure any non-telepath could.
I had time to relax completely into the throne before I heard footsteps and cracked open an eye. There was Thomas, his arms full of our old friends, the swamp bromeliad. Sally was behind him, carrying a crate of what looked like ritual tools. He began laying the flowers out around me, careful to avoid the thorns. I started to sit up. He waved me back down.
