Page 41 of Spelunking Through Hell

I didn’t know how to answer that, other than with anger, and anger didn’t feel like the right reaction, not yet. Still, a part of me wanted to rage. How dare he? After all this time, after I’d done all this work, how dare he judge me for how I’d done it? He was lucky I’d bothered to come for him at all, when he was the one who’d sold himself to the crossroads in the first place. I could have stayed in Buckley with my babies. I could have learned how to let go. Mary had been more than willing to help me do that if I’d wanted to. And instead, I’d chosen fifty years of running and bleeding and loneliness, for the sake of a man who wanted tojudgeme?

Even as the anger flared in my chest, I did my best to damp it down, reminding myself that he had made his bargain to save my life. If he hadn’t done that, we wouldn’t be here because I’d be dead. All my other choices had been my own. The only person who’d done any of this to me was me.

“I did what I had to do,” I said. “I’d do it all over again if I knew this was where we’d wind up. And I’m not sure I approve of allyourchoices, either. To start with, what’s with this whole Autarch deal? The last thing I expected to do was get here and find out that my husband has turned into some sort of dystopian warlord—and with aharem, no less!”

“A... harem? What are you talking about?”

“Don’t all those women belong to you?”

“God, no.” He looked horrified enough by the idea that I laughed. I couldn’t help myself.

“Good,” I said. “Because just so we’re clear, I don’t plan on sharing you with any other wives.”

“I forgot how adorable you were when you let yourself give in to jealousy,” he said, with the kind of smile that meant he was suppressing a laugh.

I glared at him. “I’m glad you’re finding this amusing, but given that when I woke up—again, let me stress, basicallynaked—the first person I met told me I was in the women’s quarters, and all newcomers were under the protection of the Autarch, perhaps you can see how I might have gotten the wrong impression.”

“Yes, and I’m sorry about that,” he said. “The situation is... somewhat complicated, and I owe you an explanation.” He sat up, leaning back against the wall beside me with his shoulder touching mine, and reached out to intertwine my fingers with his, apparently feeling safe to do so. I didn’t pull away. We had a lot of unpleasant conversations ahead of us, and we had to hold onto each other.

“When I first arrived here, I landed in the middle of a war,” he said. “The crossroads threw anyone they’d made a bargain with and wanted to dispose of into this convenient killing jar, and some of those people... well, weren’t very nice. They were killing each other. I arrived and realized I would have to put a stop to it if I wanted things to be stable enough to let me research a way out of here. So I took over.”

He made it sound so simple. From the shadows in his eyes, it had been anything but. He looked like a man who’d seen things he could never unsee, done things he could never undo, and regretted that fact every day of his life.

“Some of the people making war on their neighbors were doing it for the control of resources,” he continued, looking down at his hands, resting as they were between his knees. “Water is scarce here. Food was equally so before we began establishing the necessary safety to let us tend our fields. Both of those were things to be controlled.”

“Guessing ‘women’ also made that list, huh?” I ventured.

Thomas nodded miserably. “Not only women—the strong enslaved the weak without much regard for gender—but yes. They were in hell. This is a hell world, and they were literally in hell. So when I took everything else as my own, I took the people as well. But it isn’t quite how it appears.”

I raised my eyebrows and said nothing, giving him the space to continue.

Thomas sighed. “I became Autarch by killing the previous Autarch, but he wasn’t the only—how did you put it?—dystopian warlord this world had produced. There are still other factions here who are very much in that mold, and over the years I’ve found the most effective strategy is to let them believe that I’m cut from the same cloth, only stronger and more ruthless. If my people suspect a new arrival may have been sent to infiltrate our ranks, we don’t let them see how things truly operate until we know if they can be trusted.”

“So all that was just... what, a show for my benefit?”

“Much of it, yes. Do you really think all those women have nothing better to do than sit around all day pretending to be my concubines?”

“I’m sure some of them wouldn’t mind,” I muttered. “And I can see how Sally might be your type.”

He raised an eyebrow. “My ‘type’?”

“Human, stubborn, likes to get into fights?”

“If I have a type, it’s only because ofyou,” he retorted. “Sally was seventeen when she arrived in this dimension, and even were I not a married man, if you’ll recall, I refused to see you in that manner untilyou were well into your twenties. What’s more, Sally has no interest in the male of her species. She’s quite content to serve as my lieutenant, and she has no illusions about our relationship.”

He looked at his free hand, where his wedding ring caught the light. “I can’t say others didn’t offer, but I never took any of them up on it. It would have meant admitting that I had given up all hope of ever getting home. I couldn’t do that. Not to you, and not to our children, and most of all, not to myself. Some days, the pretty lie of finding a way out of here was all that could keep me from giving in to despair.”

I didn’t say anything, just tightened my fingers around his. Thomas flashed me a quick, grateful look before looking away again, like this was all easier to say when he didn’t have to face me as he said it.

“So you thought I was another of those crossroads assassins,” I said, and shook my head. “But why were the crossroads trying to kill you? They already had you. I thought the point for them was to torture you as much as possible, and being trapped in hell seems worse than just being dead.”

“You would think so. But ‘the mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of Hell, a Hell of heaven.”

“Now you’ve lost me.”

“I’m a sorcerer,” he said. “A fully trained, adult sorcerer who understands what my own magic is capable of. This world doesn’t have much magic remaining to it, but everyone the crossroads deposited here was ripped through multiple dimensional walls on their way to the final barrier, and they landed with a heavy harvest weighing them down. With their consent, I’ve been collecting it all this time, and using it to power various passive effects.”

“Like theKeep Outsigns Sally was talking about?”

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