Page 55 of Spelunking Through Hell

“Won’t work with my pack, and being unarmored only matters if they hit me,” I said. “Don’t worry about me getting cold.”

“Right, because you’re indestructible.”

“Nope, just lucky, exceptionally hard to kill, and covered in single-use charms intended to keep me alive in any terrain.”

“You better be right about all this. Or I’ll kill you myself.”

“I didn’t realize you were a necromancer.” I beamed at her. “We ready to go?”

Sally looked annoyed but let me have the point. “The others are waiting outside, and the messengers have already been dispatched. They’re each carrying a portable translation and amplification charm—and those take a lot of juice to make, so you better be serious about getting us out of here.” She turned to the guards, stomping one foot with a ringing sound. “Together,move,” she snapped.

She had a cheerleader’s cadence that I recognized all too well, and the tone of a warrior. Whatever she’d been back in Maine, she was powerful here, and her men fell into position without hesitation, forming a phalanx around us. Sally began to move. The rest of us moved with her, the guards in anticipation, me to avoid being left behind.

“Between the way the Autarch constructed our outer defenses and the lookouts we have patrolling, we know roughly when and where the enemy will be arriving,” said Sally as we walked. The door wasn’t far. One of the guards pushed it open, revealing the half-dead land I’d seen when I first arrived. One by one, we stepped out, the last guard closed the door behind us, and we were alone in a hostile landscape.

That was nothing new. I’ve been alone in a hostile landscape one way or another for most of my life. We started forward, into the dead land.

I paused after about twenty yards, looking back at the compoundThomas and his people had claimed for their own. I still couldn’t figure out where I’d seen it before, or why it all looked so damn familiar.

Sally wasn’t wrong about the cold outside the walls. I pressed two fingers to the skin below my jaw as I started walking again, focusing on the match tattooed there, and a wave of warmth washed over me, chasing the cold away.

Every step kicked up a small cloud of dust, and while some of the bushes were very obviously dead once I got close to them, others shied away from me, reacting almost like sea anemones in the presence of a predator. A world of reactive vegetation was nothing unique, but I’ve always found plants that move to be more fun than the other kind. Sadly, I didn’t know if they’d have defenses—toxins or stinging sap—and we were in a hurry; I couldn’t allow myself the brief luxury of prodding them unless I wanted to risk losing an hour to an allergic reaction. Sometimes being responsible is the boring way to do things.

Two more detachments of guards came to join us as we walked, none of them giving me much more than a second glance. I was with Sally, they trusted Sally, I must belong here. I wondered what she’d done to earn such faith from these people, many of whom were visibly scarred, none of whom were obviously human. By the time Sally called for a halt, we were a force easily fifty strong, bristling with polearms, swords, and bows.

There was nothing in front of us. No people, no visible threats. I glanced at Sally, trying to assess the situation. She shook her head and gestured to the air, a little bit above head height. I looked again, squinting when it still looked like nothing in particular. Finally, I saw it: there was a faint soap bubble shimmer in the air, like a film of rainbows overlain across the rotting sky.

“That’s the edge of the Autarch’s protection spells,” she said, voice tight. “Not much beyond that point. Including air. Air is important. Most people need it if we want to live.”

“So this is where we fight?”

“No, this is where we take a really damn deep breath, and where you trigger those bubbles the boss said he saw on your arm.”

“Shoulder, actually,” I said, as coolly as I could, and pressed my hand against a line of bubbles tattooed at my shoulder. My head spun even as the dust and dryness seemed to vanish from the air. I hadn’t realized how thin it was even on this side of the barrier. “A little blood sugar’s a fair trade for a lack of hypoxia, I guess. How are you going to be okay?”

“Practice,” she said. “We’re like those Olympians from Coloradoat this point. The ones who’ve trained for so long in crappy conditions that we’re superheroes when we get down to sea level. Only what we’re training for is fighting people where there isn’t enough oxygen in the air.”

“What fun hobbies you people have,” I said.

She smirked at me, then gestured for the group to resume walking.

The barrier offered no resistance. Even with the charm, I could tell the air was thinner there, making it harder for me to draw a full breath. At least it was still breathable. The charm would last about three hours as long as I didn’t run into any burning buildings; it would run out faster if I made it deal with actual smoke.

Outside the barrier, the sky was even uglier, the rotting yellow color of a bruise that had barely healed past the purple-black stage, the shade that meant something was dying. If there was a sun somewhere up there, I couldn’t see it, lost as it was behind the layers of dust, ash, and cloud. The world looked sick because the worldwassick. More, because the world was dead.

The world had been dead for a long, long time. It had just remained tethered to the crossroads somehow, tied to their poison in a terrible way I didn’t quite understand, and they had been feeding it by throwing their exiles here. Every time the crossroads threw someone away, they’d been feeding magic back into the biosphere. Not enough to heal it—not enough to grow into a new membrane or to bring the dead, decaying thing it was back to life—but enough to let it limp along in a state of suspended animation, never fully collapsing.

And then they’d thrown Thomas through, clever, clever Thomas, who was so much more adaptable than most of his kind, who had already learned the techniques for tucking magic into his flesh for later use, ink and sigils and potential, who had found a way to tap into that shallow well and use that magic as if it were his own. He’d been protecting the other exiles, making this world a better place for them to live, and hastening its death at the same time.

He might have known that. He might have considered it a good thing. Better a hundred good years than five hundred years of endless suffering as the biome rotted to the point where it could no longer support anything resembling life. Or he might have been acting as a sorcerer, not a conservationist. He’d never been a part of my family’s obsession, had married in as an adult and been imprisoned at the same time, making it impossible for him to do more than help with research. Field work and seeing the impact of little changes to theecosystem had never been an option for him. He might never have realized what he was potentially doing.

Or he’d realized it and confirmed he wasn’t doing it, and I was completely off-base, woolgathering as I walked. But it made sense, based on everything I’d managed to learn about the way this system worked, and the way he and Sally both agreed this reality was falling apart faster now that new arrivals from the crossroads weren’t falling out of the sky. There was no new magic coming into the world. What little did arrive, Thomas took and hoarded, and however good his reasons were, however necessary his actions, the fact remained that he was like the man with the only well for miles around, taking all the water for his own lands.

It felt weird to be thinking critically about the man I’d come here to find while on my way to parlay with his enemies, but it was also necessary. A clouded head never does anyone any good, that’s what my grandmother used to say, and Grandma was almost always right about almost everything. Enid Healy was the culmination of a hundred generations of careful Covenant breeding plans, and they were lucky she hadn’t burned the damn place to the ground on her way out the door.

A line of dust had appeared in the distance. Sally signaled us to stop again, then gestured for the guards to fan out and form a line.

The land wasn’t entirely flat; near the dusty plumes, I could see the kind of rocky outcroppings that I associated with Arizona and with certain episodes ofStar Trek. The thought made me want to laugh. I swallowed the sound, only snorting a little in muffled mirth. Why did I keep getting into fights in places where Kirk and Spock would have fit right in, with their polyester and their bright Technicolor future? Desert landscapes are cheap to film in, sure and they seem to occur on any planet with a biome capable of supporting humanoid life, but it was still funny.

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