Page 20 of Spelunking Through Hell

“Meadowsweet.”

“Ah. It’s nice.” I took a longer drink before saying, “I’m just heading out again. Found a new direction in a diary by some old dimensional explorer, a man named Aikanis. Naga said he was a satyr. I thought you might know something about him.”

Phoebe turned and stared at me, hands still full of dough. “Aikanis?” she asked. Then, more loudly, “Did you find him?”

“I found some of his books,” I said, and bent to retrieve the map roll from the floor. “And this map. I think they go together. I didn’t check to make sure.”

Comparing the handwriting could confirm it, but also might not prove anything; many explorers travel with cartographers, rather than drawing their own maps. I certainly don’t draw my own maps. Couldn’t work a protractor if you paid me. So maybe Aikanis had just been charting someone else’s expedition.

I paused before uncapping the roll. “Is there a table where I can spread this out?” I asked, looking to Helen, who stared at me like she’d just seen a ghost. Ghosts didn’t seem to be as common on Ithaca as they were on Earth. I’d never been sure why. Maybe Ithacans just died with less in the way of unfinished business.

“This way,” said Helen, and gestured for me to follow her as she turned to go deeper into the house. “The dining room.”

I grabbed my pack—maybe they’d want to see the books—and followed.

She led me to a room dominated by a massive oak table, which was covered by a tatted lace runner my grandmother would have admired endlessly. She pushed it aside and motioned for me to spread out the map, so I uncapped the map roll and did precisely that, producing knives from inside my shirt and laying them out on the corners.

Phoebe, who had come up behind me, gasped and pushed her way between me and the map, her hands pressed to her mouth. She muttered something, words too muffled by her palms for me to make them out, before reaching down and tracing one of the pathways with her finger, not quite making contact with the paper.

She lowered her other hand and turned her head to look at me. Her pupils were rectangular, like a goat’s, but her tears were perfectly understandable. “We never knew what happened to him,” she said. “He just... he didn’t come home.”

I blinked. “This map is very old, and there’s a whole library at the university named after him,” I said. “How long agodidhe disappear?”

“Satyrs are very focused on the family,” said Helen quietly. “Aikanis the mapmaker is known enough even now that his name has been taken to retirement, and his family has never known what became of him.”

As my family would never know what had become of me if I insisted on going as far out as I was currently intending to and didn’t make it back. That wasn’t a thought worth dwelling on. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t realize either of you would be relatives of his, or I would have been more circumspect in my questioning.”

“He was my októfather,” said Phoebe, the word untranslatable but still twisting itself inside my head to “eight-father.”

“That’s a lot more efficient than the way we’d say it back home,” I said. “We’d just repeat the word ‘great’ eight times, probably while counting on our fingers.”

Both of them stared at me.

“And you don’t care about that,” I said. “Right. Okay. So you’re adescendant of his. And he didn’t come back from his last expedition. I have two books that were with the map. There were three originally, but Naga took one.”

Helen’s face hardened. “He knows the Ithacan government has declared all artifacts not specifically deeded to other dimensions to be cultural treasures and requested their immediate return.”

Meaning I wasn’t walking away from here with the map. That was fine. I have a good memory, and I could take notes. “Maybe he’s planning to return it.”

“Or maybe he was counting on the fact that you wouldn’t know about the law and didn’t realize you would think to tell us.” Helen shook her head, then paused. “If you didn’t know Aikanis and Phoebe were related, whydidyou come here and tell us? I know you’ve never used Ithaca for a jumping-off point.”

“Not often, no,” I said, and bent to pull the two books out of my pack. “The book Naga took included a list of jumps leading to what Aikanis called a ‘bottle world,’ whatever that means, and to get there, I need to get to Cornale to reach the bottle.”

“Which means you need to start from here unless you want to go the long way ’round, and I’m guessing you’re already going pretty far,” said Helen. I blinked at her, and she gestured toward the necklaces that dangled against my chest. “It’s nice to see you fueling something without burning yourself up to do it.”

“These still throw me off balance, but yeah, I have to go farther than I’ve ever gone before. I thought there was nothing past Cornale that I could survive.”

Helen and Phoebe exchanged a look, expressions turning concerned before they looked back to me.

“Alice... we told you that wasn’t so,” said Phoebe carefully. “The last time you were here. Don’t you remember?”

“No, and I think I would,” I said.

They exchanged another glance.

“Alice...” said Helen.

“No, Naga told me there was nothing past Cornale, and you’ve never told me any differently,” I said.

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