Page 24 of Spelunking Through Hell

Either my translation charm was still working—impressive, after more than three hours—or the note was written in English. Either way, it read, “Welcome, traveler! The fire needs no feeding. Cheese and bread have been left in the box by the door. If you choose to linger, we will see you when the sun rises. If not, we are sorry to have missed you, and glad to have supplied you with a moment of peace on your journey.”

I put the note back down, smiling to myself. Sometimes people are pretty decent. Not that I was going to eat anything they’d left for me. Sometimes people are really good at pretending to be pretty decent when they’re actually predatory assholes trying to set up nice little caches of meat on the bone to help them get through the winter. There was a door. I walked over and pulled it open, revealing a frozen, snow-swirled landscape that explained Phoebe’s instructions, and made me even more grateful for the fire. I closed the door.

Well, I couldn’t eat their food, but I wasn’t hungry yet after lunch with Phoebe and Helen, and while my key for the next world involved thinking about jungles, I didn’t really want to rush on before my hair was dry. I walked over to the fireplace and sat down on the edge, leaning as close to the flames as I could without actually setting myself on fire.

Dating and eventually marrying an elemental sorcerer whose magic liked to express itself in flames was a great way to get way too casual about the risk of immolation. I had to jerk upright several times to keep my hair from going up and was once again glad I’d been keeping it short.

Once I was sure I was dry enough, I stood, walked forward, and closed my eyes again, pulling a bead from my necklace. This had been a nice waystation, and maybe it was as innocent as it seemed to be, but it was time for me to move along.

That bottle world wasn’t getting any less dead.

The next five worlds passed in much the same way, brief glimpses of one tiny slice of what they had to offer, what was accessible when traveling along this particular route. If I’d been approaching from another starting point, I would have passed through other dimensions along the way, which was how I knew Cornale in the first place; it had been part of a chain I’d run along to bring back a bounty, and taken from that direction, it had only been five jumps away from Empusa. But taken from that direction, there had been no bottle world. Reality is like a kaleidoscope. The angle you view things at makes a huge difference.

My last step dropped me into Cornale, but a whole different part of the world. Rather than the wide, open scrubland of my last visit, I was standing in an alley that looked like it could have been lifted from a period drama about Victorian England, tall brick walls rising around me and cobblestones under my feet. I couldn’t tell whether the placement of my arrival was due to the alley being built to accommodate travelers, or whether the beads I’d been using to cross had shunted me out of sight of the locals. It didn’t entirely matter.

I paused to shrug off my pack and pull out two packs of my electrolyte powder, ripping them open and dumping them into my mouth. They tasted like vaguely fruit-flavored dust, sucking the moisture from my tongue. There was technically nothing to chew, but I chewed anyway, trying to work up enough spit to let me swallow. Food is easy to carry between worlds. Liquid is more difficult. It’s heavier, for one thing, and sometimes the different physical rules from dimension to dimension will make it start boiling, or freeze, or otherwise render it undrinkable.

I don’t know why that doesn’t happen to the water inside a person’s body. There’s a lot about dimensional travel that I don’t know. Given how long I’ve been doing it basically full time, that seemed odd to me, like there were questions I should have been asking all along but somehow hadn’t been. Thinking about it made my head hurt a little, and so I stopped. It wasn’t going to help me right now one way or another, and it’s better not to get distracted in potentially hostile territory.

The powder had absorbed enough spit to be a thick paste. I swallowed it, waiting until my head stopped spinning before I shrugged my pack back on and stepped cautiously out of the alleyway, looking around.

According to Phoebe and what she’d found in Aikanis’ notes, the bottle world’s opening would be approximately a league away in a westward direction. If his definition of league matched mine, that would be about three miles. Hopefully, there’d be something to tell me when I was getting close. Normal weak spots can sometimes show themselves in their environment—if you know how to look for them. Maybe they’re places without any obvious water source and really lush flowers. (Of course, those could also be underground springs or body dumps, it’s hard to say without a shovel). Or maybe they’re narrow strips where the bugs are a different color, or a little too big, or behaving oddly. It usually manifests in plants and insects if it’s going to impact anything living. It’s never something that’s super obvious. You have to learn how to look.

I’ve been learning for fifty years. Weak spots are easier places to cross, and when you’re chasing a whisper across worlds, you start looking for easy whenever you can. They can also, as in this case, signal an access point for a world that’s not widely accessible from anywhere else.

There were people on the street. Most were substantially more respectably dressed than I was, or at least they were wearing substantially more clothing, which I assumed meant the same thing; it was difficult to say without more context. At least none of them pointed at me, threw up, or fainted. That was nice.

Most worlds that are close enough to Earth to support human life as we understand it will have some sort of biped somewhere in their local food chain, regardless of what dimension it’s in. The bipeds don’t always win out—see also Empusa, where Naga and the other lamia ran the show without any native bipeds to offer conflict or competition—but we happen, at some point in the evolutionary chain.

That’s nothing to get all smug about. Those are just the easy-to-access worlds, the ones where we can live. There are worlds that belong to creatures we wouldn’t even be able to recognize as forms of life, entire dimensions so packed with snakes that they’ve basically given up on having anything in themexceptsnakes, places where the things that have managed to catch on and thrive would make Earth’s Cambrian period look measured and reasonable. The limitations of the human form keep us, mostly, from tripping and falling into worldswhere the air would dissolve our bones, and it means that when we do run into the locals, they may consider us a little weird looking, but no more so than we’d think about a perfectly ordinary cryptid.

If the architecture made me think of Victorian London, the clothing was more akin to Meiji-era Japan, long, loose garments that looked something like kimonos on people of all ages and sizes. Almost everyone I could see was taller than me, thin in a way that could have been either genetics or fashion, with skin in varying shades of blue, green, and even pale purple. Their hair was a similar range of colors, plus red and black. All of them seemed to keep it long, and about half the people on the street had jeweled pins holding it in place. They weren’t staring and so I didn’t stare either, just turned in a slow circle as I tried to get my bearings.

Thus far, my trip had been environmentally annoying and occasionally exhausting, but had involved surprisingly little violence. I was starting to wonder how many of the fights I’d been in had been consequences of Naga sending me after criminals, and not a matter of the universe being an inherently hostile place.

Had he actuallyaskedme before sending me on the first set of bounties? Or had he just added, after giving me a map to a potential lead on Thomas, that if I were to capture a few runaway criminals, I’d be able to make some money and put myself into a better position to keep searching? I wasn’t actually sure anymore. It had been such a long time, and there had been so much suffering between then and now. I remembered everything before this all began vividly and with absolute clarity. Much of the last fifty years was a lot fuzzier.

Maybe that was bad. Maybe when I finished this expedition, regardless of how it ended, it was time for me to go home and talk to someone. Or maybe I needed to stay focused and not let myself get distracted by worrying about things that wouldn’t change anything.

Naga had been helping me get back to my husband. If he’d decided to make himself a little profit in the process, I couldn’t exactly blame him; not when he’d been feeding, housing, and caring for me for all this time. I’d never have been able to make it this far without him.

Some of the people on the street were starting to nudge each other and turn to look at me. More details about their physicality became obvious in that motion. What I’d initially taken for some kind of iridescent shawl worn by people of all ages and quality of clothing was actually the thin membrane of a pair of wings that sprouted from the shoulder blades and then folded down to approximately waist level before stretching upward and over the arms, meeting at the middle ofthe chest in two hooked claws that formed a shape almost like a brooch. Given the way ideas sometimes cross-pollinate across realities, maybe that was where humanity had gotten the concept, although fastening a thing with another thing seemed straightforward enough that we could have reached that conclusion on our own.

The direction I needed to go followed the line of the street, which was convenient. I started to walk, not rushing enough to attract more attention than my alien nature was already going to, but quickly enough to make it clear that I was going somewhere. I wasn’t just a weird alien thing walking around their city for fun. Maybe that would be enough to let me avoid any awkward encounters with the locals.

Maybe not. When I reached the corner, three people dropped out of the sky, folding their wings as they landed. Their descent allowed me to glimpse bare, clawed feet and long, fringed tails that I would have assumed belonged to amphibians if not for the rest of the package they presented. All three were armed, holding long spears with shafts of polished metal.

Well, crap. So much for doing this quietly.

“Greetings, traveler,” said the one on the end, one of the ones with jeweled pins in their hair. They bowed shallowly toward me, keeping their spear rigidly upright. That was nice. I can be calm about implicit threats. I’m not as good at ignoring explicit ones. “It’s been some time since we’ve seen someone come through that gate. It had almost been forgotten. What brings you to our fair city?”

“I’m just passing through,” I said, pleased that the locals either spoke English for some ridiculous—but not impossible—reason or had translation devices, magical or technological, that let us communicate. It didn’t matter in the end how it was happening. It only mattered that it was. “Is there a problem?”

“Oh, no,” continued the speaker. “We’re simply delighted to receive a visitor.”

The hair on the back of my neck stood up. I glanced over my shoulder. Three more people with spears had appeared there, watching me with studied carelessness. That’s the trouble with people who can fly. They don’t always approach from directions you can anticipate.

“In fact, we would be honored beyond reason if you would agree to come with us and meet the jaghirdar. They are always eager to meet new people and hear their impressions of our fair land.”

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