Page 13 of Spelunking Through Hell

“I’ll have to undress you if you can’t stand.”

“That doesn’t make my legs hurt any less,” I said. “No, I can’t stand.”

“All right.” He sucked air through his teeth, a sharp, tight sound. “Alice, the injuries on your upper legs are severe enough that I’m not sure I can remove your shorts in one piece.”

“Nothing special about them,” I said. Waves of exhaustion were starting to wash over me, alternating with the waves of pain. The recovery I’d managed at the Red Angel was long gone at this point, and I was done. “Cut ’em off.”

“Good girl.”

He slithered forward, setting me down on the hard metal surface of an operating table, and a moment later, I heard the snick of scissorsbeing opened. A few quick cuts and I was naked, still too tired to move or cover myself. Not that I needed to. Lamia aren’t attracted to mammals, and unlike many of the humanoid reptiles on Earth, they never developed mammalian mimicry. No breasts for these serpents. No hair, either. And while I’d met quite a few of them by this point, I had yet to encounter a single one who saw a naked human as anything other than a novelty, or, on a few unpleasant occasions, as something easier to eat.

One of the medics hissed above me. I tensed. A hand brushed my shoulder, accompanied by a hissed interrogative, which Naga answered before sighing, and saying, in English, “They want to know how many dimensions you touched. I told them you began with fifteen crossings, but they need to position the blades appropriately.”

“Right...” It was getting hard to think. I took a few deep breaths, trying to buy myself time, before I said, “Here to Ithaca, Ithaca to Xxyres, Xxyres to a series of sub-dimensions whose names I don’t know...” On and on the list went, ending with, “Helos to Earth, Earth back to Helos, Helos to here. How many is that? I can’t count.”

“Thirteen,” he said, with some satisfaction. “You touched thirteen dimensions, including this one and your own.”

“Not... quite... a record, then.” Each word felt like an effort, and when the last of them was out, I sighed and relaxed into the table. Tension wouldn’t do me any good anyway, and I knew it. I’d been here before.

“No, but close enough.” He reached down and smoothed my hair away from my forehead. “How deep shall they go?”

“Shallow,” I said. “Don’t want to get... any younger.”

I was already functionally, physically in my early twenties, and it had been a fight to get that much ground back, after the time they’d gone too deep and left me effectively seventeen again, still growing, still a little gangly. Naga had scolded them roundly after that incident, reminding them I couldn’t do my joborhunt for my husband if my hands were too small to hold my gun, but it had meant several seasons of slower work, never going too far from either Earth or Empusa, for fear that I’d get hurt enough to need another session.

Naga chuckled. “And here when your snake cults call on us, eternal youth is one of the most common requests,” he said.

“Not... worth it,” I replied.

“No, I suppose it’s not.” He stroked my forehead again. “Here’s where I leave you. Try to keep the screaming to a minimum this time?”

“No... promises.”

He laughed outright as he slithered away, heading back to the door. I heard it open, then close, and then I was surrounded by the medics, their hands lifting me away from the metal table and the remains of my clothes. Fingers dug into one of the larger wounds, grasping the end of a spike and yanking it out.

I did not keep the screaming to a minimum. Removing that spike hurt just as much as I’d been afraid it would, ripping through tissue with the fierce precision of something that had not evolved to benice. If the medics had an issue with it, they could damn well cope.

Judging by their aggravated hissing, they didn’t like the noise. That was fine. As long as they didn’t go too deep, it wasn’t like there was much they could do to me that they weren’t already going to do. And they didn’t drop me, which was the only thing I’d been particularly worried about.

Still hissing to each other, they lowered me into a warm liquid and let me go. Whatever this stuff was, it was thicker than water, and I floated easily, at no danger of slipping under, even as I remained completely limp. The longer I could keep myself from tensing up, the less this was going to hurt.

Not that anything could actuallykeepit from hurting—pain was inevitable in this process—but hurtinglesswas something to hope for, no matter what the surrounding circumstances. One of them moved away, scales scraping on the floor, and I heard the rattle of metal. They were almost ready to begin.

“Please,” I said, voice small. “Please, I can just take some antibiotics. You don’t have to do this. Please...”

This was one of those moments when I was glad none of them had ever learned English. My begging wouldn’t stop them, and I trusted Naga. He wouldn’t do this to me if it wasn’t necessary. I would never have made it this far without him. This was just what had to happen, because I’d been careless enough to get jumped, to get hurt and use my only healing charm before getting hurt even worse. This was my fault, really.

This was always my fault.

Then the first blade was pressed into the skin just above my collarbone, biting into the flesh with very little pressure, and I found exactly how much screaming I had left inside me. As it turned out, I had alotof screaming.

I always did.

Five

“There is no price too great to pay to ensure the safety of the ones we love. To question that is to question your love for them.”

—Jonathan Healy

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