Page 54 of Spelunking Through Hell

“You have no idea.” He smiled. “The Haspers won’t know what hit them.”

Fifteen

“I knew what I was doing when I asked her to marry me, all three times. I’m just lucky she finally realized I was doing it.”

—Thomas Price

Walking across a blasted plain to fight a hostile warlord, you know, like a really clever person who wants to live to see tomorrow

The armory and thewomen’s quarters were located on opposite sides of the complex center, meaning that what followed was a lengthy walk, maybe fifteen minutes in all, through long, almost featureless halls. Thomas had gone off to convene his council of advisers and do whatever else it was he did before going into battle. Without him present, Sally and I were saying as little as possible in an effort not to antagonize one another. Well, I was making an effort, anyway; maybe she just didn’t feel like talking to me. “Did you build this place?” I asked when I couldn’t take the silence any longer.

“Me? No. All the land grabs were finished a long time before I was born,” she said. “Benefit of having an Autarch who doesn’t really age; you have time for some pretty extended projects. But he didn’t build it either. Whoever lived here before things got bad built it.” She shrugged. “We don’t know who they were. Maybe they died out centuries ago, maybe they just couldn’t stay here after the wells dried up, and some of the people in the gangs we try to hold off are their descendants. Either way, boss says this place was a ruin when he found it, and he spent a long time and a lot of resources building it back up into something that could protect his people. Even before the magic got involved, when it was all manual labor and struggle.”

I nodded. “That sounds like Thomas.”

“You know he’s not the same guy, right?” She looked at me. “I’mnot the same girl, and I’ve only been here for seven years. My family’s probably still alive. According to you, James finally got out of that little shithole town where we both expected to live until we died. I could go home, except for the part where I couldn’t possibly, because I’m not the girl they’ve been waiting for all this time. I’m someone new, and her skin won’t fit me anymore.”

“I know,” I said. “You could say the same thing about me if you wanted to. Trauma changes who you are, and there’s no way to say ‘well, I’m finished with this, I’m going to move on now.’ You have to figure out how to reconcile it with everything else you understand about yourself, and sometimes it really sucks.”

Sally raised an eyebrow. “You’re surprisingly calm about this.”

“I’ve had a lot of time to come to terms with the fact that I’m essentially broken,” I said. “I was worried until I got here that I’d have broken in ways that Thomas couldn’t handle, and I still might be—I’m sure we both have some nasty surprises under the surface, just waiting to be discovered. That’s another way trauma works. For every bruise you can see, there’s another spot where it’s just all about the internal bleeding.” I still couldn’t think too hard about what Thomas had said about Naga and his choices. Had he really been using me to harvest dimensional pneuma, treating me like a snake cult all his own, a battering ram determined enough to keep slamming through the walls of the world until I broke myself? If he’d had a less invasive way to keep me in fighting shape, it seemed really likely.

For fifty years, he’d been the ally I trusted above all others, even my own family. If I thought about it, I could remember hundreds of little course corrections, gentle suggestions I’d interpreted solely as him trying to help, and not as him trying to protect a resource. I might not have been able to get out of this place if I’d found it before finding the books, before Annie killed the crossroads... but I could havebeenhere. I could have been hereyearsago, if not for Naga interfering with the direction of my journey. I would still have been damaged. We both would have been. But we would have been damaged together, and, suddenly, that seemed like a luxury beyond all measure.

“Hey.” Sally snapped her fingers. “Come back. Wherever you’re going off to, it’s not your mission. You get that this is dangerous, and the boss will literally murder me if you get careless and get yourself killed, right?”

“I didn’t spend fifty years finding him to go and die before he could leave the toilet seat up again,” I said. “Calm down, princess. I’ll be fine.”

“Good,” said Sally. “Because I’m still notcompletelyon board with the idea that you are the person you’re claiming to be. It’s all a bit too convenient for me. New arrivals stop coming, and you justhappento finally get here, and to not have aged, and surprise, the arrivals stopped because ding-dong, the witch is dead, and it’s the boss’ granddaughter who did the killing?Andyou know James? It’s all a little too on the nose to be realistic. You can see that, right?”

“I can,” I agreed. A lifetime of walking in a haze of weird coincidence and convenience has left me well aware of how weird my life can be—and how much people tend to assume that “my life is built on a foundation of weird coincidence” will mean “my life is always perfect, and everything goes my way.” The least likely result is bad just as often as it’s good.

“And all that being said, whether I believe in you or not is sort of irrelevant becausehebelieves in you. He really thinks you’re his dead, missing, octogenarian wife,” said Sally. “You convinced him, and I guess that means you’ve halfway convinced me, because he was always going to be the hardest sell.”

I knew we were getting closer to the armory from the sound of shuffling feet and clanking metal, and I straightened my spine before we came around the bend in the hall to see about a dozen men in leather and hammered metal armor standing outside another of those rounded doors. They all stood at attention when they saw Sally, barely seeming to notice me. That was a nice change. I’m so used to being the scariest thing in the room that I’d almost forgotten things could work any other way.

Sally shot me a last, warning look and slipped through the door, leaving me to face the group of guards alone. I smiled wanly.

“You hit me,” said one of them.

I blinked. It was one of the ones who’d been between me and the exit back in the women’s quarters. “You had the voulge, right?” I asked.

He nodded, slow and sullen.

“It was a nice weapon. I appreciated it a lot.” It was probably back in the armory by now. Maybe Sally would bring it out for one of us to use.

“I don’t understand how you can go so quickly from assaulting a guard to joining an expedition into the badlands,” he said, stiffly.

“Oh, that’s easy. I’m the Autarch’s wife.”

The group exploded into mutters and whispers. I looked at them placidly. There was no way they hadn’t already been informed of whoI was, but hearing something and having it confirmed were two different things entirely.

Sally emerged from the armory, pausing to toss me a heavy leather jacket. I caught it, giving her a dubious look.

“Put this on,” she said. “You’re basically unarmored right now, and it’s cold as hell out there. If you go out there and get yourself killed, it’s going to break him, and he’s all that’s been holding this place together. If you die in the wastes, you doom us all.”

The muttering stopped as the guards stared at Sally. Hearing and confirming were different. Confirmation from someone they knew and trusted was something else altogether. I looked at the jacket in my hand, wrinkled my nose, and tossed it back.

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