Page 33 of Spelunking Through Hell

Ten

“If there is anyone in this world or the next more stubborn than Alice Healy once she gets her teeth into something, I truly hope to never meet them.”

—Mary Dunlavy

Running hell-bent for leather down an unfamiliar hallway, hoping I won’t have to kill anyone

The alarm was aloud, shrill belling sound that seemed to pour out of the walls themselves, filling the air. It wasn’t quite loud enough to disorient, but it definitely made it harder to focus on what I was doing. Footsteps filled the hall behind me, running after me, and a spear clattered to the ground some feet ahead of me, thrown by a guard who clearly hadn’t stopped to consider that when you only have one weapon, throwing it at people isn’t the best plan. I paused to duck down and grab it, whipping around to face the sounds of pursuit. All the guards who hadn’t already been knocked down were running after me, accompanied by about half a dozen more who had apparently answered the call.

And all of them were carrying polearms from the same grab bag assortment of ways to stab people. When I found the Autarch, after I finished beating the everloving crap out of him—twice if my suspicions were correct—we were going to have a serious talk about diversity in armaments.

I threw the spear back at the one in the front. My aim was better than theirs. It hit them in the shoulder, embedding itself there and sending them rocking backward into the rank of guards behind them as they clutched at the wound. The blood that spurted forth was darker than I would have expected. Biology is fun sometimes. I turned my attention back to the hall ahead of me and kept running.

I had a head start and a lot of practice fleeing from angry mobs. I was also barefoot and dealing with the aftereffects of physically and magically exhausting myself breaking through the dimensional barrier. That meant we were probably on roughly equal footing.

The hall widened ahead of me, into another of those wide, round openings. I plunged through, into a tiled courtyard lined with unfamiliar vegetation, like something out of a home décor magazine. I kept running.

The guards, when they reached the opening, didn’t. They stopped there, piling into one another, but didn’t cross the boundary. That probably wasn’t a good sign.

The branches around me weren’t rustling. I slowed down, coming to a stop right around the center of the courtyard, and looked at my surroundings more closely. Most really predatory plants are attracted to motion. If they were going to strike, they would strike at me while I was moving. Still nothing rustled in the brush. Still nothing appeared to threaten me.

Then I smelled apples mixed with strawberries. It was a characteristic perfume, and one I hadn’t been expecting to find here. Looking more closely at the trees, I saw the vines wrapped around them, green and edged in white, the thorny “teeth” of the bromeliads outlining them. I looked down at the ground. Thin white roots snaked across the tile. This whole place was a bromeliad feeding nest.

And here was I, barefoot in the middle of it. No wonder the guards had stopped. I’d step on a vine or a mature enough root any second now, if I hadn’t already, and the soporific sap would get into my veins. After that, it was only a matter of time before I collapsed.

Or it should have been only a matter of time. You don’t run around the disreputable parts of several dozen dimensions without finding a way to avoid roofies. I pressed my fingers against the ammonite tattooed over my hip, pressing hard to make up for the lack of skin contact. Like hell was I taking off my robe, thin as it was, with the guards looking on.

The tattoo warmed beneath my fingers as it dissolved, and a brief wave of dizziness told me that the price had been paid for temporary poison resistance. I began walking across the courtyard again, watching my step. The thorns might not be able to incapacitate me, but they would still sting like the dickens if I stepped on them directly.

What kind of person keeps a courtyard full ofswamp bromeliadsin a place easily accessible from hisharem? Not a person who worries much about the women supposedly under his protection. I scowled asI angled for the archway on the far side of the courtyard. I was liking this Autarch less and less, and that was pretty impressive, given where I’d started. I was honestly beginning to hope I was wrong. The man I was looking for would never have been this careless about the safety of others. Time changes everyone. I didn’t want it to have changed him like this.

The archway on the other side was as open as the others had been. I stepped through into a narrower hall. The air was cooler here, probably in part due to the high windows on the walls, which allowed the wind to pass though. The air hadn’t been stale in the other wing, but it had been still, something I hadn’t really noticed at the time. There were doors along this hall. All of them were circular, matching the rest of the local architecture, but unlike the majority I’d seen in the wing where I woke up, they actually haddoorsin them, closing off the rooms on the other side.

I ignored them and kept going. The alarm was still ringing, but no additional guards had shown up to complicate my day. Either therewereno additional guards, which didn’t make a lot of sense, or they assumed they would only have to wait a few more minutes before I passed out from the bromeliad sap, becoming much easier to collect without further risk to life or limb.

Or maybe they just didn’t like their Autarch all that much. It would make sense. People don’t usually like the guy who takes all the women. Mostly because that guy is usually a jerk.

At the end of the hall was another, much larger circular arch, containing a pair of tall, closed doors. I gripped my voulge tightly and strode toward it. The end of my long journey might be on the other side. If that was the case, I didn’t know what I was going to do next. I also didn’t know whether it would end well, and I wasn’t ready for that. And it was too late to turn back now.

It was too late by fifty years. I approached the door. I pushed the latch.

It swung open, and I stepped through.

The room on the other side was a throne room. There wasn’t any other way to describe it: it was too big, too grandiose to be anything else, like something out of a Gothic castle as designed by architects from Hobbiton, who couldn’t think in terms of things being impressive without them also being round. A single worn rug ran from the doorall the way to the back of the room, a distance that felt as long as a football field but was probably more like a hundred and fifty feet in reality, where it reached the foot of an ornate wooden throne.

Unlike almost everything else in here, the throne had hard edges, and looked like it had been crafted according to more familiar-to-me rules of design. It was stained dark with some sort of resin, and the smell of apples and strawberries hung distantly in the air, telling me where at least some of the materials had originated. And I was focusing on the throne to avoid focusing on anything else.

Like how empty it was. This should have been the seat of the Autarch, but there were no guards here, no attendants... and no Autarch. I walked forward, the carpet muffling my footsteps and the room swallowing what sound managed to escape. Something about the rounded ceiling stopped echoes from growing the way they should have, rendering the room almost entirely silent. It was uncomfortably so.

I stopped when I reached the throne, reaching out to touch the cushion on the seat with careful fingers. It was still warm. Maybe the lack of guards had been a logistical one; I’d been running away from the wives, so they didn’t need to be protected, and the guards who hadn’t already been behind me had been busy getting the Autarch away from the madwoman with the polearm. It was good tactics, even if it meant I still hadn’t had the fight I was absolutely spoiling for.

A door opened in the wall behind the throne itself, about a dozen feet farther back and small enough to blend in with the paneling around it. It didn’t match the other doors I’d seen so far: instead, it was rectangular, swinging out like a part of the wall and vanishing when it swung closed again. A man stepped out into the room. I swung around to face him, voulge held at the ready. Maybe not the nicest “hello, honey” anyone has ever managed, but it was the one I had in me at the moment.

The man was human, or close enough to human to have passed even on a busy street back home, head bent slightly as he studied something in his hands. His hair was brown, still short enough to count as “short,” but long enough to have become slightly disheveled, and barely starting to gray at the temples. He was wearing a white shirt, sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and brown slacks of the same kind I’d seen on Sally and the guards, and it was suddenly very, very difficult for me to breathe, because his forearms were a riot of colorful tattoos, and similar images were just barely visible above the collar of his shirt, working their way along the curve of his neck. I managed toraise the voulge so that it was no longer pointed directly at him. That was about all that I could do while otherwise frozen.

With the acoustics of the room swallowing the sound of my breathing, he made it several steps closer before he realized he wasn’t alone. He stopped and lifted his head, blinking from behind the frames of unfamiliar glasses. That was almost a relief. If he’d been wearing the same pair after fifty years, I would have assumed this was a hallucination.

The glasses were the only thing about him that were unfamiliar. I knew that face, almost as well as I knew my own. He’d lost some weight since leaving Buckley, but I’d seen him worn thin and wrung out before; when I came back from college, after my one abortive attempt to leave the life I’d been born to behind, it had been to find him a prisoner in his own home, dependent on the charity of the local Women’s Aid Society, hungry and unkempt and imprisoned by his own choices. He looked better now than he had then.

---