Page 62 of Spelunking Through Hell

That’s not an invitation I’ve ever been able to turn down. I took his hand and let him pull me against his side, only wincing a little when my bruised elbow brushed his side. He gave me a hard sidelong look, clearly picking up on even that brief discomfort. I managed a smile. Nothing was broken, and I wasn’t bleeding internally. He was going to have to remember what life with me was like because there were some things that weren’t going to change.

“A village which is still in dire danger,” snapped one of the other men. “We brought as much with us as we could carry when you called for us to take shelter within the palace walls, but the O’Vera are coming. They’ll be upon us in a matter of hours. We have to protect our fields and our homes!”

“Then we’ll fight them off, the same way we always have before,” Thomas replied.

“They’ve never been sending this kind of force before,” said the man. “You have to see that this is different.”

“I do, and we’re taking this situation very seriously, but as I’ve been trying to explain, we won’t be here much longer, and then the fields won’t matter.” He turned to Sally. “How many of your guards are ready to be sent back out?”

“About two thirds, at a guess,” she said. “We lost fewer than usual, thanks to somebody,” she hooked a thumb toward me, “deciding she could aggro a whole pack of Haspers by herself. But we’re going to need more archers—we don’t have enough to protect both the palace and the farmland at the same time.”

Thomas gave me a hard look. “Did she,” he said, and it wasn’t a question.

There was no point in denying it. I smiled at him. “You knew I was a tailypo when you picked me up.”

“True enough,” he said, fond despite himself. “I did.”

“We have greater issues at the moment,” insisted one of the advisers. “We don’t need guards. Weneedan act of great and terrible magic!”

“As I keep telling you, great and terrible magic is no longer an option,” said Thomas. “The pneuma of this world is dead, and we receive no additional infusions, thanks to the cessation of new arrivals.”

“You closed the barrier between this world and the cosmos,” said one of the men. “Can’t you open them again?”

“That’s part of the problem,” said Thomas. “I already did.”

Everyone fell silent, visibly shocked by this announcement.

“Excuse me, you didwhat?” I asked.

“While you were sleeping, I took down the barrier that was keeping people from entering this dimension. As your arrival proves, even with the barrier in place, people could get through if they pushed hard enough. Once, the crossroads did the pushing. Not anymore. They’re gone. So it seemed wise to stop powering the barrier in order to conserve what magic I have left,” he said softly. “This world has been dead for a long time, and we’ve been prolonging the inevitable for aslong as we possibly could. We can’t prolong it anymore. The collapse is coming. The fields will die, the wells will fail, and all will be brutality and chaos until it finally, mercifully ends.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Is this really new information, gentlemen?” I could tell there was still something he wasn’t saying, which was strange. It had been a while, but I still thought I knew my husband, and he was normally tediously enthusiastic about sharing information regarding impending doom.

“No,” admitted one of the advisers. “But it seems very final, and there has to be another way.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve seen a lot of corpses in my day. Never yet met one where I could tell it that it was time to stop being dead and get more use out of it.” That wasn’t technically true. My son-in-law, Martin, is a Revenant, meaning he’d been several dead men before an enterprising mad scientist glued and stapled them all together and ran the perfect electrical current through his heart. Or hearts, I’ve never been clear on what he’s working with, and it’s never seemed polite to ask.

But Martin is a special case, assembled by an expert. We didn’t have two more dead worlds to splice this one into, and even if we did, we were too small to survive an electric current of that magnitude. No. There was no option that allowed human-sized life to stay here.

The one with all the eyes frowned at me. It was pretty impressive, given all the glaring he was built to do. None of them looked overly thrilled by my presence, except for Thomas, who looked quietly content, an expression I’d spent years mistaking for neutrality while we were learning one another.

A process I was more than ready to start over from the top. I stepped up to the table, skimming the tips of my fingers over their map and staring at it until I found what I was looking for, what I had somehow already known would be there. “Don’t bother defending the walls,” I said. “Call everyone into the compound.”

“Excuse me?” said one of the advisers.

I smiled sweetly at him. “Call them all in,” I said. “All your guards, all your people, any particularly beloved house pets, any living thing you want to see survive, call them in.”

“What?”

“Look at this.” I pointed to the edge of the walls around the compound. They extended farther than I’d been able to see from my limited exposure, stretching out to sweep mostly around the shape of what I assumed was meant to represent the village. “There’s a gap inthe wall. You have enemies on their way who can fly, who eat living flesh, and who would be happy to treat this gap as the best kill chute ever constructed.”

Something about the shape of the full compound still nagged at the edges of my mind. I’d seen this before. This shape, this construction style, I’dseenit before. I just didn’t know precisely where.

“So you let the invaders come,” I said. “You let them burn the fields when they can’t find anyone to kill. You let them do what they’ve come here to do. And we fight them through a bottleneck, if we fight them at all, not in a mob.”

They stared at me before looking to Thomas, like children begging their father to tell Mommy to stop being so mean. He looked at me. I looked back, defiant.

“You know I’m right,” I said. “I’ve been out there, Thomas. Even if you save your crops this time, how long before the survivors attack again? They have even less food than you do, and the air outside the barrier is barely worthy of the name. They’re desperate, and they’re not going to back off, and if we don’t find a way out of here soon, we’re not going to.”

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