Page 12 of Spelunking Through Hell

The corndog was hot, savory, and far less confusing. We walked, and I ate, and the carousel music played, and overall, it was a much more pleasant flashback than most of them tended to be.

“Come on,” she said, beckoning me toward a tent. “Darkness will help the transition.”

We stepped inside, and everything went black, as the temperature rose by at least six degrees, the air growing suddenly humid and ripe with the smell of snake. I opened my eyes, which had still been closed in the present if not the past, on the dim, familiar confines of my bedroom in the dimension where I currently spent... not the majority of my time, but the majority of the time when not actively in transit from one world to another. This was my home base, as much as I had one,and the place I returned to, always. If I only had one crossing charm left, it brought me here, not back to Buckley.

Much as Buckley was and would always be the true home and haven of my heart, this had to be my final stop, if only because this was where Naga and my tattoo artists were. Without them, my journey would be over. I dropped everything I was carrying onto the floor next to the bed, including my pack, and staggered out into the hall. Every step sent another wave of pain through me as the spikes in my legs shifted and tore, but I kept walking. It wasn’t like they could do any permanent damage.

The hall outside my room was long and gently curved, and entirely undecorated, without even pictures on the walls or a rug on the floor. It used to be jarring, when I first started spending time here, the way they left all communal spaces as bare as possible. Now, it seemed only natural, and human-decorated residences, like my own, were almost unbearably cluttered. Only the fact that I hadn’t redecorated since Thomas disappeared kept me from getting rid of half the things in the house. But he might object, and I wanted him to be comfortable when I brought him home, assuming I got the chance.

Walking was slower than normal, the spikes working their way deeper and deeper into my flesh and slowing me down still further, but I forced myself to keep going. The smell of snake grew stronger. My room was about as far as it was possible to get from Naga’s office without being in another building altogether. He found the smell of live mammal as disconcerting as I found the smell of live snake, and we both had to make allowances. Still, I was grateful. He’d been under no obligation to help me when I’d first come sobbing to his side, and he could easily have turned me away.

Instead, he’d offered to do whatever he could to get me back to Thomas, arranged for my first set of tracking charms, and sent me on my way. Without him, even getting off Earth would have been the next best thing to impossible, given my lack of personal magic. Because he was willing to lend me his resources, I’d traveled farther, seen more, than any other human I knew. Maybe than any other human, ever. We’re not a species that encourages a lot of cross-dimensional exploration, and it’s not easy for us.

I tried to focus on my gratitude as I limped down the hall, and not on the fact that I didn’t know how close we were to his dinner time. Naga has a long-standing policy, as befits a Professor of Extra-Dimensional Studies at the University of K’larth, of not eating anything or anyone to who he has been formally introduced. I accomplishedthat introduction myself when I was six years old and had been snatched by a group of snake cultists intent on sacrificing me to him as part of a ritual bid to seize control of what they mistakenly believed to be a snake god—it’s always snake gods with snake cultists, and somehow they believe that he who has the biggest snake will get to rule the world, not just have to clean up after the biggest snake.

I’m sure Freud would have a few things to say about that, if he weren’t a dead hack who would probably also be happy to say that my fondness for knives stemmed from a bad case of penis envy. I do not have a bad case of penis envy. I have a bad case of wanting to own more knives, and those are not the same thing.

Anyway, Naga and I have known each other a long time, and he wasn’t going to eat me, but that didn’t make it polite to tempt him. I stopped when I reached the door to his chambers, which was large and round to admit his not insubstantial bulk, and knocked as I leaned up against the hallway wall, trying not to whimper. The spines had worked themselves so deep by this point that I wasn’t sure I could have removed them on my own if I’d tried, and I wasn’t trying. If it had been unsafe before, it was potentially fatal now.

When there was no answer, I knocked again, harder. If Naga wasn’t here, he was probably in his office, and if he was in his office, I was in trouble. There was no way I could walk that far in my current condition, and now that I’d stopped moving, I wasn’t actually sure I could start again. Even getting back to my room felt like an impossibility. I bit my lip to stop myself from whimpering and slumped against the wall, closing my eyes.

I don’t know how long I stood there like that before there was a slithering sound behind me. I didn’t bother trying to turn. Either it was Naga, or it wasn’t. If it wasn’t, maybe it was one of his grad students who thought of me as an annoying pet and might try to eat me. That would be a lousy way to end my multi-decade quest, done in by a giant crawdad and a hungry scholar, but I was exhausted and injured and basicallydone.

“Alice,” said Naga, sounding horrified. “What have you done to yourself this time?”

Arms wrapped around my waist, lifting me easily, and I found myself tucked into a bridal carry against the smooth, scaled chest of my patron and benefactor. I managed to open my eyes and smile weakly up at him.

Naga looked sternly back. He was well-equipped for looking stern, at least by human standards, what with his total lack of hair, yellow,slit-pupiled eyes, and finely scaled skin. The scales grew larger as they moved down his body; by the time they reached his waist, they were as large and hard as the scales on any snake his size, and since that size was fairly substantial, we were talking about alotof scales, many of them larger than my palm.

“Got myself jumped on that retrieval gig,” I said, and winced as he turned to slither down the hall. I knew he was heading for the infirmary. That, at least, was normal.

“And that explains why you’re leaking on me how?”

“Had to go back to... Earth to patch myself up after the initial fight... hurt worse then, if you can believe it.” I mustered a weak smile. From the look on his face, he didn’t believe it at all. Oh, well. It was the truth, and the truth was always worth trying. “Got back to business with one crossing left, had to finish with what I had on hand.” I closed my eyes again. “Did it. Got what I’d been sent to get. Got my own stuff back, too.”

“Got a nasty case of what looks like some form of septic shock, too,” said Naga. “You’ve used all your crossings?”

I managed a minute nod. He sighed.

“It’s soon, but I think it’s time for another session,” he said. “You’ve used so many of your tattoos it looks like you’ve been shedding, and this damage... I don’t know if the thing that left those needles in your body was poisonous to humans, but I wouldn’t be surprised. Are you ready?”

No. I was never ready. That didn’t mean it wasn’t necessary, or that I didn’t understand the reasons; I’d been going through this process for fifty years, and any good reasons I might have had to put it off had long since fallen by the wayside. I sighed.

“As long as it gets them out, I don’t care.”

“It gets everything out,” he said, and slithered on.

I didn’t open my eyes once during the trip. I didn’t need to. This was a familiar journey, one that I’d made in both better and worse shape than I was in now. Naga carried me down the hall to one of the courtyards that dotted his estate, then turned to head into a narrower hall, one he wouldn’t be able to fit down for too many more years. Lamia like Naga keep growing throughout their lives, which can span almost a thousand years when all is said and done, and they get steadily larger the whole time. He’d been twenty feet long when we first met, and I’dbeen a child. Now, I was an adult holding herself frozen in time, and he was almost fifty feet from the top of his head to the tip of his tail.

Hopefully, I wasn’t going to need him to take care of me by the time he was too big for this estate and had to move to one of the larger ones. I’ve never been sure how lamia society handles that transition, and I wasn’t overly interested in finding out firsthand. I huddled in his arms, a feeling of rotten wrongness radiating out from the puncture wounds on my legs, and tried not to shiver. He was probably right about the poison. If he wasn’t, it could still be a slow allergic reaction or just a response to the filth that had been on those spikes when they went into me. They were there now, and probably killing me. The mechanism didn’t make that much of a difference.

He ducked as he carried me through a door, and I heard other people for the first time. He said something in the rough sibilants of his own language, and they responded in kind. Most of the medical staff had never taken the time to learn English, which their mouths could handle, while mine couldn’t handle their language. I’d tried. It just sounded like so much hissing to my ears. According to Naga, I couldn’t even hear the upper registers of his language.

At least my tattoo artists spoke English. I could tell them what I needed to stay safe and do my best work, and they could help me choose the right designs. They were good about steering me away from things that might take too much out of me, pulling too much power and depleting my reserves to the point where a little electrolyte replacement powder wouldn’t help.

“Can you stand?” asked Naga.

I consulted silently with my body and sighed. “I don’t think so,” I said.

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