Page 28 of Spelunking Through Hell

I needed my own white rabbit to follow, or I wasn’t even going to find the rabbit hole, much less have the chance to go tumbling down it into whatever wonderland was waiting on the other side. I needed to breathe. I needed a moment. That was all. Just a moment, to sit and seethe and feel sorry for myself, freed from the pressure of moving forward.

So I pressed my hands over my eyes and slumped, and listened to the wind rattling the scrub, and the trickle of water in the distance, and—

Hold on. I uncovered my eyes and sat up straighter, focusing on the sound of running water. I’d seen nothing to indicate that there was any running water left in this wasteland. I followed the sound, pausing to close my eyes occasionally and reassure myself that I really was hearing what I thought I was hearing. The sound got louder. I smelled water, petrichor, dust becoming mud, and I opened my eyes, looking down at a narrow creek running where it shouldn’t have been able to run.

It emerged from a crevasse in the rock and flowed lightly downhill, which made sense, wetting the ground around it. Small insects filled the air, the first signs of real life I’d seen out here, and even as I watched, a tiny brown lizard-like creature streaked out from between two rocks and snatched one of them out of the air. This place was still trying to survive. Despite everything the people in the city had said,despite the condition of this scrubland, the world was stilltrying. I couldn’t help but be grudgingly impressed, even as I followed the creek, trying to see how far it went.

Something was calling the water up from the rocks. Given everything else around me, I didn’t think it was likely to be natural hydroponics, an assumption that I felt briefly smug about when I realized the water was flowing, however briefly, along an uphill slope. I kept following it, moving deeper into the rocks, listening carefully for signs that I might be disturbing the sparse local wildlife. There wasn’t much left out here. What there was probably wouldn’t be of the friendly variety.

The creek finished its uphill run and began to flow downhill again, toward a small pond that had formed at the bottom of a shallow depression. It was a spot of green in a gray-brown landscape, ringed with tall waterweeds. Even one of the blasted old trees was still growing here, branches putting out leaves and small, pale-yellow fruits that looked something like wrinkled apples. Larger insects flitted among the branches, and tiny winged lizards whose scales shone the same colors as the skins of the locals.

This had probably been a beautiful place, once, before whatever had happened to kill the soul of the neighboring dimension and infect the world next door, trapping them all in the spreading haze of its decay. How many worlds could be sickened by one dead one refusing to release its hold on the membrane between dimensions? The world next to Cornale had clearly been rotting for some time. How long had it taken for things to get this bad? Would Cornale get better once the dead world was cut away and the wound was allowed to heal, or was it too late? Was this world’s anima mundi also doomed to keep getting sicker and eventually die?

And I was oversimplifying again. What was on the other side of the gate I was about to open wasn’t a deadworld, it was a deaddimension.Everything an entire reality had had the potential to be, gone, reduced to the slow decay and constriction of decomposition. If this world’s pneuma died, it wouldn’t kill the dimensional oversoul of this reality. There could be countless life-bearing worlds in this dimension, a whole cosmos of people who would start dying as Cornale’s rot sickened their worlds’ pneuma.

No wonder the jaghirdar had mentioned the possibility of Cornale’s membrane being separated from the ones around it, isolating this world so the infection couldn’t spread. And if I wanted to get Thomas back before that happened, I needed to move. I walked to the pond’s edge,studying the water long enough to reassure myself that there were no large predators present, then stepped up onto a large, flat rock and pulled a bead from my necklace.

It was almost denuded. If I was in the wrong spot, I would only have so many tries before it was stop trying or don’t make it back to Ithaca, much less home.

“Healy family luck,” I said, looking at the bead in my palm. “Sometimes it’s good and sometimes it’s bad, but it’s never, ever boring.”

No matter how this went, it wasn’t going to be boring. If I could be sure of nothing else, I could at least be sure of that. I dropped the bead to the rock, put my foot on top of it, and closed my eyes.

I had no direction to aim for, no details about the bottle world except that it was dead and things that went in couldn’t get back out. But I also had the soothing conviction that I was on the right path, and so I held to that in lieu of anything else that might have served me as a guide. If I went this way, I would find my husband. I would find my answers. He might be alive, and he might be dead, but either way, I’dknow, and once I knew, I could finally put down the burden I’d been carrying for so long and go home to the family who loved me, hated me, and mourned me, all at the same time. This was the door that would let me have my life back, and all I had to do was force it open.

The air grew thick and heavy, with the reeling, unsettling feeling that normally came from a dimensional crossing, but nothing happened. The heavy feeling lifted, and I opened my eyes on the same landscape, now feeling a little dizzy. I scowled. Of course it couldn’t be that easy.

Another bead, another stomp, another long pause while I thought as hard as I could about where I wanted to go, and another failure. My head was starting to spin, and my heart was beating way too fast, which is a potential sign of low blood sugar that I wanted to avoid if I possibly could.

Fine. I was going to have to force my way through this. I let go of the necklace and pressed two fingers against the highest remaining gate tattoo on my arm. It would take more out of me, but it might let me push harder, and there wassomethingthere. I could tell that much, even if I couldn’t tell exactly what it was. There wassomethingon the other side of my shove, some pressure resisting me coming through. I could manage one more push, probably, before I’d need to eat something and get my blood sugar back toward normal.

That could wait. I looked around, reassuring myself that this was the most likely place. It felt almost like I was slamming myself upagainst a door that had been intentionally locked to keep people like me from coming through. Well, that made sense, I guess. Any locals who knew how to manage dimensional math would have wanted the door to the all-consuming gangrenous death dimension closed before it ate everyone in sight, and if dead places were easy to reach, the rot would probably spread even faster than it already did.

The water was collecting here. The world was slightly out of sync with what it had become here. This was the soft spot if anyplace was.

I pressed my fingers harder against my arm, closed my eyes, andshoved.

This time, the membrane let me through. It didn’t feel like any membrane I’d ever experienced before. Transition via tattoo was usually a blur, a twist, and some scene from my past that I didn’t want to experience, thanks. Transition via the beads left out the home movie but was otherwise identical. On the rare occasions when I’ve had to move through a membrane thick enough to provide resistance, it’s been a longer flashback and a sensation something like pushing through a soap bubble and something like pushing through a spiderweb—solid enough that you notice it, so ephemeral that most of the noticing happens when you’re already through to the other side, free to focus on wondering whether you need a shower.

This was like pushing through a moldy shower curtain that had been slashed into ribbons for use in a haunted house, or through a literal fleshy membrane. I kept shoving, trying to force it to yield, and it snapped, so abruptly that I could almost feel it.

The air, which had already been dry and arid, suddenly turned abrasive, all moisture gone. I opened my eyes.

The wasteland was gone, replaced by a different, even less welcoming expanse of barren ground. There was a group of low buildings about two hundred yards away: weathered, sun-bleached sandstone with no visible windows. Something about the shape of the compound was familiar, like I had seen this before, only in a better setting. The sky was the color of dirty dishwater, less cloudy than clogged with the ghosts of countless dust storms, but when I blinked, I could almost see the same building under a different sky, pale violet and beautiful.

I must have run into this style of architecture on some other world. Maybe the original residents had time to get out before everything fell apart. I didn’t have time to dwell on the thought, because when I tried to take a step forward and get my bearings, my head spun and I dropped to my knees.

My body and I aren’t always friends, but we’ve been together a longtime, and I’ve had years to chart the effects of magical overexertion on a system that isn’t built for it. My blood sugar was in the toilet. My heart was beating too fast, and my head was still spinning, leaving me dizzy and disoriented. Thoughts were difficult to pull together, resisting my attempts to assemble them into a coherent shape. I knew I needed to get into my pack, needed to swallow some electrolyte powder and probably some glucose gel, but the steps involved in taking it off and working the zipper seemed like a set of insurmountable tasks.

I closed my eyes. If I just let myself rest for a moment, I’d be fine. I’d bounce back the way I always had before, and I’d be ready to pick myself up and keep on going. This was no big deal. I’d done worse, and I’d survived.

My last conscious thought was:This is a really stupid way to die.

And then the ceaseless hammering of my heart drove me down into the dark.

Nine

“Sometimes you have to let go. Sometimes it’s the only way. I learned that lesson, and it hurt like hell. Not sure how I failed so hard in teaching it to my son.”

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