Page 75 of Spelunking Through Hell

“You were quite mad when the crossroads took me, and you’re quite mad now, and I have never been more grateful to be going home with you,” he said.

“I’m glad, because you’re not going anywhere else,” I said, and kissed him like I meant it, and everything was good between us. Afterfifty years, more broken bones than I could count, and hundreds of dead ends, everything was finally good.

With Helen directing everyone, we had the camp torn down and packed up well before sunset, then followed her through the wastes toward the point where we’d be making the crossing to the next world in line. I had to admit that the Ithacan method of travel was more pleasant than my own. Instead of crashing through dimensions with the equivalent of a sledgehammer, Helen and Phoebe had a whole group of what they called cartographers, each of whom carried a set of tools that allowed them to calibrate the thickness of the dimensional walls. They knew precisely where we had to go to meet the least resistance, then painted temporary runes on rocks gathered from the surrounding area and used them to build a rough circle we could all pass through.

The stones stayed behind where, Helen assured me, the runes would dissolve in less than a day. Someone who happened upon them before then would be able to copy whatever remained if they were quick about it, but the mere act of being activated would degrade the runes enough to render them useless.

I was pretty sure that didn’t work as well as Helen thought it did, which would explain why there were echoes of Ithacan runes in so many of the dimensions I’d seen, but that was an argument for another time. For now, we just needed to get away from Cornale before the locals ate us.

Unlike the pain and screaming of escaping the bottle universe, or even the shove and effort of crossing on my own, this was painless and almost straightforward. Helen and Phoebe set the circle, two of their cartographers activated the runes, and a section of the air turned hazy and faintly reflective, like the heat haze off a summer highway. One by one, we walked through and left Cornale—and the grave of a dead dimension—behind.

Twenty-one

“I just want her to live long enough to figure out what makes her happy. I just want her to be free.”

—Jonathan Healy

Ithaca, a week later

Moving at a paceset by the slowest members of our company meant that it had taken us the better part of a week to make it from Cornale back to Ithaca, where the fields around Helen and Phoebe’s house became a vibrant array of tents and temporary campsites as our many refugees made themselves... not at home, exactly, but as comfortable as they could be. Most of them had never seen this much green in their lives, and watching the children stare in awe at every flower and butterfly made me oddly glad that we had started with Cornale, where at least the landscape was a little bit comprehensible to them. We were easing them into a healthier existence.

We were easing all of us into a healthier existence. One where Sally slept with both eyes closed. One where I slept at all, curled against my husband, both of us waking up every time the other so much as sneezed. One where Thomas could feed on the pneuma of a healthy world, rebuilding depleted reserves so fundamental that he should never have been able to access, much less empty, them. We were healing.

“You’re sure about this?” asked Sally, who looked much more like an Earth girl in her early twenties now that she had showered, combed her hair, and traded her battle leathers for a simple Ithacan shift. She still carried that spear like it was her favorite teddy bear. I’d even seen her sleeping with it, one leg wrapped around the pole like she thought someone was going to try to steal it in the night. She might not be wearing her trauma as obviously as some of the others, but she was still wearing it.

“We’requitesure,” said Thomas, voice gone prim and tight, the way it always did when he couldn’t even disapprove of something, because he was too busy being openly outraged by it. He took my hand and squeezed it tightly, eyes still on Sally. “This needs to be done before we can move on, and we’ve been imposing on our hosts for long enough.”

“Hospitality has no time limit,” said Helen, walking into camp with a bag of apples over one shoulder. She was promptly swarmed by the younger children, while the older ones held back and watched her with hungry eyes, wrapped in the developing shrouds of their own dignity. “But still, it’s nice to know that you don’t plan to stay forever. Phoebe thinks she’s almost finished charting a course that will touch on all the worlds and dimensions you need to visit in order to take the refugees home. It shouldn’t take you more than a year, moving at a reasonable pace, and there are a few worlds blended or empty enough to settle anyone who was born in the bottle and has nowhere else to go.”

“A year, we can survive,” said Thomas, not letting go of my hand.

“Especially if we’re going to get my things,” I agreed. “I’m going to need more ammo.” With no more flensings in my future and my body still not up to the strain of channeling magic, I was going to be limited to the weapons I had on hand for the foreseeable future, maybe forever. That didn’t really feel like a downgrade, since one of the weapons I had on hand now was Thomas.

“And then we go home,” said Thomas. “To stay.”

“If you never visit at all, we’ll be very annoyed at you,” said Helen, handing her bag of apples off to one of the older children to distribute. “Odysseus always comes back to Ithaca, after all.”

“We only have two stops to make,” I said, before Helen could keep going down the Odysseus route. It made me vaguely uncomfortable, in a “I don’t want to do this for another ten years because you attracted the universe’s attention” sort of way. “Empusa, then Earth, and then we’ll be back for everyone, so we can start moving. You can watch them long enough for us to make the circuit, yeah?”

“Of course,” said Helen. “Don’t be silly. Your charges will be safe.”

“I’m coming with you,” said Sally.

“It’s not advisable,” said Thomas. “Honestly, I’d be happy to skip the stop on Earth, if not for the fact that Alice refuses to go a full year without her clergy.”

“The mice won’t take it well if I go silent for another year and they don’t have a witness with me,” I said. “I’ve already been gone longer than I intended to be, and I owe them the chance to get answers.”

“Even so,” said Thomas. “It’s a risk.”

“I know.” The risk was mostly that we’d be seen and lose the will to come back and continue what we needed to do, but I wasn’t kidding when I said I owed it to the mice. They had been with me faithfully for my entire life. Leaving them out of something this important wouldn’t just be unfair, it would be cruel.

“All right,” said Helen, with a heavy sigh. “Be safe, you three. Be careful and be safe.”

“Never learned how to be careful,” I said cheerfully. “But we’ll do our best.”

Thomas laughed and let go of my hand, and we walked toward the transit circle that would allow us to chart a straight line to Empusa with the least power possible.

Time to go talk to a snake.

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