Page 17 of Spelunking Through Hell

Six

“Alice doesn’t trust fast, but once she decides it’s safe to trust at all, she trusts absolutely. I love that girl, but it’s going to get her killed one of these days, and I don’t know what I’m going to do when that happens.”

—Laura Campbell

About to enter the office of Naga, Professor of Extra-Dimensional Studies at the University of K’larth

Naga’s door was slightlyajar, as it always was during his office hours. I paused outside, listening for the hisses that would have meant he was consulting with a student. I might have free run of the estate when I was there, but that didn’t mean I was allowed to just go busting in on him while he was at work.

Only silence greeted me. I took a deep breath and pushed the door open, holding the first of the three books under my arm and carrying the bags I’d been sent to recover in my opposite hand. “Hey, Naga,” I said, by way of greeting. “I was just about to get back on the move, and thought I’d drop these off with you first.”

He was behind his desk, the great bulk of his body coiled beneath him and his humanoid upper body held at attention. I’ve never been able to understand how he could make that look so effortless, and I would absolutely love to get my hands on some X-rays or a skeletal model of a member of his species, because I want toknow. He had a parchment in his hand, and he put it down as he turned to look at me, lightly scaled lips tilting upward in a smile.

“Alice,” he said. “I wasn’t sure you’d come to see me before you left.”

“I know, I know, but I’m not in as big of a hurry this time as I was last time.” I put the bags down next to the door, where they wouldn’tblock his path if he tried to slither out. “I don’t know if everything’s there. I didn’t want to go digging around in a client’s stuff. But the packs are still tied, and the raiders didn’t seem to be looting the things they stole very thoroughly before they tossed them in the pile. They got my pack, too, and they didn’t even steal the TNT.”

“You shouldn’t run around with explosives in your bag the way you do,” he said, somewhat chidingly. “One day that’s going to go very poorly for you, and if it happens far enough away from here, I’ll never know what cliffside I need to go and scrape you off of.”

“Yeah, but when that happens, at least it won’t be my problem anymore.” I smiled at him, trying to look as charming as I possibly could. Naga sighed. He’s never been easy for me to charm.

“You want something,” he said.

“We redid my tattoos,” I said. “I have to keep the power on my gateways the same in order to bring Thomas home, but I think I might want to go a little farther afield this time. Is there anything portable I can take with me, to make sure I won’t get stranded someplace where I don’t have any allies?” And why had I never thought to ask that before?

The question was almost surprising enough to make me lose my train of thought. I blinked, waiting for Naga’s reply.

Naga looked dubious. “Why would you need to go farther afield?” he asked. “I know there are directions off of Tartarus that you haven’t finished exploring, and there are still bounties around Helos to be cleared.”

I blinked again before frowning. “You do remember the point of all this isn’t collecting bounties, it’s getting back to my husband, right? That’s all I’m trying to do. Everything else is just consequences of something that was going to happen anyway.”

“Of course, forgive me,” he said smoothly. “Still, the question remains, if slightly modified: why the sudden rush to go farther than you have before? Fifteen jumps should allow you to go as far from here as seven layers of reality, and you’ve yet to make it more than six without serious injury. What kind of friend would I be if I sent you into the void knowing that you might break yourself when too far from home to return?”

“But thisisn’tmy home. It’s my home base. That’s not the same thing. Once I find Thomas, we’re going back to Buckley, and we’re going back to our house, and we’re going to be happy.” I was going to find a way to fit myself into the space that used to fit me perfectly, even if I had to slice something off to do it. I couldn’t keep doing this forever. I needed torest.

“I know, Alice,” said Naga. “I’ve never forgotten why you started all of this, or why you allow me to help you. No one wants you to find Thomas more than I do. He always seemed like a very nice man when I knew him.”

“He wasn’t,” I said. “He isn’t, I mean. A very nice man. He’s a very practical man, and a very generous man when he cares about someone, and a very earnest man, but he’s never been a very nice man. The Covenant doesn’t encourage niceness in the people they train.” Thomas had never liked Naga. He was willing to accept that the lamia was a family friend, and had known me since I was a child, but something about him had rubbed Thomas the wrong way, and there had never been time to really figure out why.

There hadn’t been time for so many things. We deserved time, and I was tired of wasting it. It was time to bring him home.

“So please forgive me for saying this, but I don’t care about the bounties around Helos. I didn’t commit to them. The only job I was committed to was bringing back these bags, and look, I did it. Hurt myself pretty bad in the process. We need to update the threat description for Helos. The entry says there’s nothing dangerous left apart from the locals, and unfortunately, that’s just not true.”

“I wondered how you had managed to fill yourself with chitinous spikes,” admitted Naga. “My question remains. Why the sudden press to go farther afield from Empusa? I thought you had charted all the main roads from here.”

He was a professor. Professors like research and documentation. Holding this in mind, I dropped the book onto his desk. “I don’t recognize the language it’s written in, but it’s not encoded,” I said. “A simple translation charm should do it.”

Almost reverently, Naga opened the cover. “Where did you find this?” he breathed.

I was struck with the sudden firm conviction that I couldn’t possibly tell him about the other two books, or the map, if I wanted to have time to study them. His entire posture had turned possessive, and he was all but curling his arm around the book as he pulled it gently, gingerly closer to his body. Telling him that finders keepers meant it belonged to me wasn’t going to do me a scrap of good, I could tell that much already.

“It was in the junk pile the raiders on Helos had been assembling,” I said. “I saw it when I was retrieving the bags.”

“This is one of the lost journals of Aikanis,” he said, in a reverent tone. “He was one of the great dimensional cartographers. We have alibrary named after him. He vanished on his last charting expedition. His remains—and his research—have never been found. The scribes of Ithaca use a unique ink for their notation. It can’t be faked. You found what no one else has been able to.”

“Well, I don’t think he made it any farther than Helos,” I said. Crabs can break down a body in near-record time; they don’t eat the bones, but they take them away. Those books had been in the pile long enough to accumulate a layer of dust my grandmother would have grounded me over, and this researcher had been gone long enough to have a library named after him, so I was willing to bet that any forensic evidence was long, long gone.

“You read this?” Naga raised his head and looked at me, tone wary and surprisingly envious. I was the first person to have touched a work applicable to his field, and now I got to see what professional jealousy looked like on his face. It wasn’t pretty.

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