Page 19 of Spelunking Through Hell

Abruptly, I could smell the sea. Opening my eyes, I beheld Ithaca. No flashback. No moment of total disconnection from my own life. I lifted the necklace and stared at it, reeling. I could have been traveling this way thewhole time?

Oh, Naga and I were going to havewordswhen I got back.

I already touched on this a little, but it’s important to be as clear as I can, so: there are dimensions, and there are worlds. If every dimension is a body, then every world is an organ—or again, more accurately, a cell. When you enter a dimension, the direction of your approach will determine which world you wind up on—and that’s why intent matters. Every dimension I’ve visited has been as large and complex and complicated and confusing as the one I’m from, full of worlds with their own natural laws, climate, civilization or lackthereof, and inhabitants. But to go back to the blood metaphor—I know, I know, too many metaphors, like I said, I’m trying to explain the unexplainable—in order for me to cross into a new dimension, I have to havesomethingin common with it. So while there are dimensions that would kill me instantly, I don’t have access to them, no matter how close they are to my starting point or destination. I can go to worlds that don’t want to support human life, and that’s part of why I listen when people say a direction isn’t safe.

A dimension whose physical laws don’t allow for my existence wouldn’t let me in in the first place, and that’s the difference.

Naga says he assumes less than twenty percent of reality is accessible to any traveler, and honestly, that sounds more than generous to me. There’s a lot of places where humans can’t survive.

But what this really means is that everyplace I go has at least a few commonalities with the world where I grew up. Gravity, oxygen, consistent laws of physics. It’s nice. It makes a real difference, where comfort is concerned. Ithaca is only two steps removed from Earth, since Empusa is directly connected, and I found myself standing in a loose circle of old stones that were probably once part of some sort of foundation. Grass grew between them, green and sweet-smelling, with just a hint of spice.

So far, I hadn’t found anything on Ithaca that I was allergic to in pollen form, which was nice. Some of the food, yeah, which isn’t always something I have time to discover about a new world, since I tend to be in and out in short order. I was suddenly grateful that Ithaca was my best starting point. According to Naga, Aikanis had been a satyr. Maybe Helen knew something about him.

I tromped out of the circle and started down the hillside, moving toward a rustic brick-and-wood house in the middle of what looked like an entirely untended field. Appearances can be deceiving. I’d never been much more than a mile from my standard arrival spot, and while I knew all of Ithaca wasn’t a bucolic coastal paradise, that was mostly what I’d experienced. The locals were incredibly good at making things look natural and unattended while simultaneously cultivating them to within an inch of their lives.

It made walking down the hill surprisingly fraught, since I knew nothing here would be regarded as a “weed” by the people whose house I was approaching; it was all incredibly intentional. Helen’s wife once cried for three days because I’d stepped on a wildflower she’d been trying to cultivate for years, and only stopped when Helen was able to successfully harvest seeds from the flowers Ihadn’tsquashed.Phoebe still didn’t fully trust me. I couldn’t blame her, since by satyr standards I was clumsy and unobservant. Anyone who stepped on a flower was suspect to her.

At least Helen liked me. I kept descending the hill, fully visible in the afternoon light, and by the time the ground leveled out beneath my feet, the front door was banging open and Helen herself was making her appearance.

She was a reasonably tall woman with the sturdy build of someone who farmed for a living and enjoyed the fruits of her own labor a great deal, belly contained by a flowered apron and arms thick as planks. If not for the fact that from the waist down, she had the body of the largest goat I’d ever seen, she would have seemed perfectly normal.

Well, that, and the horns. “Alice!” she called jubilantly. “I didn’t expect to see you so soon.”

“Just passing through, I’m afraid, but I wanted to ask you about something, if you have a little time for me.”

“For you, my friend? Anything. Come into the kitchen. Phoebe’s been baking, and there’s fresh bread and butter if you have a hunger to you.”

“That would be lovely, thank you.” I’ve learned not to eat before going to Ithaca. For them, refusing food is a greater insult than physical assault. My grandmother had been similar, if less codified; she didn’t offer people who turned her down second chances.

One of the theories I’ve been vaguely poking about dimensional travel is that not only are the worlds closest to us almost always ones where we can survive, they’re the source of many of the cryptid species we know. The ones that seem just a little out of alignment with the local biology, that don’t make any sense from an evolutionary standpoint? Yeah, there’s a reason for that. Ithaca, the parts of it I’d seen anyway, seemed vaguely Grecian in nature, and could easily explain all those old stories about the utopian fields of Mount Olympus. Not that I’d encountered any gods here. Mostly just satyrs, who were charming, friendly people, and the occasional centaur, who were... less friendly, to put thingsextremelycharitably.

It wasn’t hard to believe that a group of satyrs might have been exploring the dimensions near their own at some point, found their way to Earth, and been stranded there. It was sadly not hard to believe that they wouldn’t have lasted long after that. Despite a skill with horticulture that felt like it verged on the supernatural, the only real inhuman talents any of them had demonstrated were the ability to walk up almost sheer cliff faces, and the power of eating virtuallyanything without having an allergic reaction. High levels of goatiness, in short.

Humans are not unique in the universe for violence. I’ve met plenty of people since I started traveling who believe that shooting first and asking questions later is absolutely the way to go and will make everything better when all is said and done. But humansarepretty unique in our narrow definition of what it means to be a person. Almost every other inhabited world I’ve been to has had multiple kinds of intelligent people living in accord, if not actually in harmony, while back on Earth, humanity’s response to realizing we were not alone had been to build bigger guns and try to fix what we saw as a problem.

So drop some people whose main attribute is looking like livestock and really, really wanting to run their farms and be left mostly alone in ancient Greece, and you’ve basically created a recipe for mildly cannibalistic goat stew. Helen smiled at me as she turned to go back into the house, clearly holding no grudges over the fact that my ancestors had probably eaten some of her distant relations. That was all in the past. Here and now, it was time for bread.

The kitchen was bright and airy, like something out of a storybook about witches who lived in the woods and dried all their herbs by hanging them in bundles around the edges of the room. The air smelled of rosemary and lavender. Another satyr was at the table, rolling out a sheet of focaccia bread. She glanced at me warily, flicking long white hair out of her eyes with a tiny jerk of her head.

“Alice,” she acknowledged.

“Phoebe,” I replied.

She grunted and went back to kneading her bread as Helen bustled into the room and past me to the icebox, which looked as old-fashioned and antiquated as anything that we’d had when I was growing up, but opened to reveal a sleek white interior, brightly lit by low-impact LED bulbs and frosty with internal cold.

“I have lemonade,” she said. “Fresh this morning, made from lemons out of our own grove. We didn’t expect to see you today.”

“We’d have been elsewhere if we had,” muttered Phoebe. It took me a moment to realize her words sounded slightly odd because they were; she was speaking the local language, which was shaped something like ancient Greek if it had managed to stay the dominant form of communication for an additional two thousand years, and something not at all like that. Centaur had different phonemes than humans or satyrs, and they’d influenced the linguistic development as much as anyone else had.

The translation charm was still working, then. That was good, since it meant I’d be able to go over the books I was carryingwithHelen, and not ask her to translate for me. “I didn’t know I was coming until about an hour ago,” I said, and shrugged off both my pack and the map roll. “Lemonade would be lovely, Helen, thank you.”

“So you’ve just been seen to?” she asked, as she pulled a pitcher out of the icebox and closed the door.

The satyrs were always very noncommittal when discussing the process by which Naga had my tattoos redrawn. I wasn’t clear on how many of the details they knew, and had never really wanted to explain, not least because my mice were never allowed in the procedure room. Something about the smell of rodents distracting my surgeons. They said farewell to me when I went with Naga and didn’t see me again until I was clean and tattooed and equipped with a full measure of skin.

If the mice had ever known exactly what I was putting myself through to keep on going, it would have been the same as telling Mary. They would have informed the rest of my clergy, and the clergy would have told the family—whether they intended to or not, the first time they decided to celebrate the Festival of Flensing or something like that, Kevin and Jane would have figured it out—and then I would have been dealing with a whole new set of problems. So telling the satyrs had always been out, because speaking those words aloud would have meant speaking them in front of the mice.

“Yes,” I said, and held out a hand as she poured me a tumbler of lemonade. It was sweet and tart and had a faint herbal taste to it that I couldn’t quite identify. “Is that mint?”

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