Page 30 of Spelunking Through Hell

I didn’t have to be invited twice. She walked out of the room into a winding hall, and I followed her, relieved when no wards activated to keep me locked in. All this could still be a trick—send your friendliest, most unassuming representative to work on the paranoid stranger while you get her to drop her guard—but I was starting to suspect that it might not be.

“You know,” I said carefully. “This isn’t what I was expecting.”

“No?” The walls out here were something smooth, plaster or clay or drywall, and had been painted as white as the walls in the room where I woke up. There was something industrial about it, like the color had been chosen because it was easy to repaint, and not for any aesthetic reasons.

She led me down the hall to a large, circular doorway leading to what I would have called a community room at a library: it was built on a scale that fit the entry, large enough to hold a small 4-H assembly. Pillars supported the ceiling at regular intervals, necessary due to the lack of load-bearing internal walls, and people were scattered around the space. Most of them were women, dressed in the same diaphanous fabric as Rubina and myself, although the cuts ranged from something that looked like pajama loungewear, with long sleeves and actual pants, all the way to dresses much shorter than Rubina’s, or my robe.

The only men stood to either side of the arch we’d just entered through, or to the sides of the matching arches on each wall, four in all. The men, all of whom were bipeds of roughly human conformation and proportions, wore brown leather, lace-up vests and tight trousers, and held an impressive assortment of polearms.

I like polearms. They’re not the most practical weapons under most circumstances—you need too much room if you’re going to use them effectively, and while they’re great for keeping people at a distance, if you’re dealing with someone who mostly works with firearms, they’ll quickly cease to be your friends, as the jaghirdar and their lackies had learned to their dismay. None of the guards—because that’s what they were, harem guards, whatever fancy description they liked to use locally—were carrying the sort of spears I’d seen in the last dimension. That was good. I wouldn’t have wanted to deal with more of the same.

But theywerecarrying spears, or at least some of them were. The rest—and there were seven in all—had an assortment of blade designs that made them look like a medieval recreation troupe with very poor historical accuracy. Fauchards and bardiche and billhooks don’t belong in the same armory, much less the same guard. I downgraded my weakly forming assessment of the local security a few steps for sloppy equipment reconciliation. Not that it would matter. Any of those things could stab me, whether or not they should be used together.

But none of the men were making any threatening moves with their weapons, and Rubina smiled at several of them as we entered.

Once I took my eyes off the polearms, I found the assortment of visible species in the room much more distracting. No two of the women looked like they’d come from the same starting dimension. While they were all vertebrate bipeds, that was about where the similarities ended. Some were covered in fur. Others had scales, or wings, or extra arms. One of them looked like she would be nine feet tall if she stood up, instead of lounging on a pile of beanbags on the floor.Any Autarch who could maintain this kind of wide-spectrum buffet of women and still want more wasn’t going to be a nice man.

Rubina led me straight across the room, waving and smiling at the women we passed, all of whom looked at us with curiosity, though they didn’t stop her or speak to me directly, even as they assessed me with their eyes. Checking out the competition if I was making my guess correctly. Wouldn’t they be surprised when they found out that I was nothing of the sort?

The entryway opposite the one we’d come through was equally large, while the entries to either end were smaller, limiting the shapes and sizes of the people who’d be able to use them. Some of the women in this room wouldn’t have been able to walk upright through those doors

Rubina stopped at the far entryway, knocking lightly on the wall. “Sally? New arrival is awake, and she wants her things back.”

“Yeah, well, some of ‘her things’ are weapons of mass destruction, so I’m not necessarily in a rush to return them,” answered a voice. Like Rubina, the speaker’s words came through in English. Unlike Rubina, she had an accent I recognized, solid Mainer. She didn’t talk like a lobsterman, but she had the inland accent, an inhale on her “yeah,” soft “r”s, and vowels that didn’t subscribe to any other region I knew, not even quite Boston.

Not the accent I would have expected to hear in a place like this, but it wasn’t the strangest thing that had happened to me today, so I was willing to roll with it.

“Sorry,” I said. “But they’re mine and I didn’t consent to having them taken, so I want them back.”

“You were practically in a coma when we found you and brought you into the compound for medical attention. I would think you’d be a little grateful,” said the speaker, who emerged from the dimness on the other side of the opening to lean against the archway and look at me flatly. “Not every day you pass out in a freezing field and wake up in a nice bed.”

Rubina seemed to have no sharp edges, despite the thorns growing out of her neck and shoulders, a woman designed for softness, like a rose from a safely walled garden. This woman was nothingbutsharp edges, every inch of her. She was dressed in the same basic uniform as the guards, in contrast to all the women I’d seen so far. Interesting, that, given how much she looked like a human being. Her hair was long and black, and her skin was a tawny beige. If I’d been asked to peg her to an Earth ethnicity for some reason—something it was hardnot to do, given how much she sounded like home—I would have guessed Asian-American, probably Korean-American.

“I thought you’d be out for a lot longer,” she said, casually pushing away from the doorway and moving closer. I tensed. She stopped, holding up her hands. “Whoa, no, not planning to hurt you. Just wanted to ask how you’re doing, see if maybe there’s anything you need. You were down pretty hard when we found you. I’m guessing you’re diabetic? And from Earth, to boot. I found the glucose paste in your bag and put it on your gums when you wouldn’t wake up. I figure that had to have helped.”

“Not diabetic,” I said, more curtly than I meant to. It had been a long, hard, weird trip, and a chatty Earth girl dressed to audition for the newMad Maxwasn’t what I’d been looking for. “Not a sorcerer either. So.”

“So you sucked all the sugar out of your own body to fuel the crossing? Nice. Innovative. And really, really stupid.” Her voice turned hard. “Shouldn’t the big-ass ‘Keep Out’ signs have been some sort of a warning that maybe this wasn’t the best stop on your vacation tour of the dimensions?”

“Excuse me?” I asked, eyebrows climbing toward my hairline. “Listen up, young lady. This isn’t a vacation tour. I’m on a mission, and I needed to be here, so I came in. I could have killed myself getting past those ‘Keep Out’ signs you mentioned. Did you set those?”

“Nope,” she said, with what seemed to be far more relish than the word warranted. She spoke like someone who’d been spoiling for a fight all day and was happy to accept it from the woman who’d just shown up if that was what she had available. “Boss did that. He wanted people to stop falling out of the sky like assholes we’d have to patch up and feed and rehabilitate. He’ll like you, though. He likes the human ones.” She looked me deliberately up and down. “Blonde’s just a bonus.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Didn’t whoever told you to try in our direction tell you? This is a roach motel. You can check in, but you can’t check out.” Her shrug was deliberately broad. It was like she was actively trying to get under my skin. Which maybe she was. Again, she stood like someone who wanted to have a fight.

Maybe she was head wife or something, and me looking human made me the competition. I didn’t actually care.

“Yes, I knew that part,” I said carefully. She might be antagonistic. That didn’t mean I had to be. “I came here on purpose after I founda cartographer’s record indicating that this was a bottle world. He got inandhe got out. Some friends of mine back in Ithaca are going over his papers to see if they can figure out how he did it and extract me.”

For a moment, what looked like hope flared in her dark eyes. She tamped it down and scowled at me. “So you really are on a vacation tour of the dimensions,” she said. “Ithaca’s a long way from here.”

“Earth’s even farther,” I said, somewhat cautiously.

To my relief, there was recognition in her nod. “Yeah, it is. Can’t imagine there’s anything this far out to be worth making the trip for. Especially not when you’re probably stuck here with the rest of us.”

“Let me worry about that,” I said. “Can I get my things?”

---