Page 8 of Spelunking Through Hell

I am not a sorcerer. I’m not a tattoo artist, either. But anyone can learn freehand tattooing, and as long as I use ink that’s been prepared for the purpose, I can amend what I already have, even if I can’t create something new. I grimaced, looking at the runes running in a line from wrist to elbow. Too many blank spaces. I had two transits left before I’d need to sit down in a proper chair and get myself redone. I started off with fifteen—the maximum number I could carry without overloading myself. There’s an upper limit to how much magic can be embedded in my flesh at any one time. We were already brushing up against it.

Two transits would be enough to get me to the dimension where I’d lost my pack and then back to base for a refresh and renew before I went deeper in. I took a breath, dipped my needle in the ink, and got to work.

Three

“Seeing the future has never done anything good, for anybody, and if I knew who had first linked seeing the dead and seeing what’s possible in the same chain of talents, I’d beat them bloody.”

—Juniper Campbell

The basement of the old Parrish place, preparing to leave Buckley Township

The tattoo on myarm was red and angry. I pressed my fingers against it and bowed my head, eyes closed. All my tattoos require intent to activate, although how much intent is on a case-by-case basis. If I accidentally blow a healing tattoo on a stubbed toe, well, sucks to be me. If I accidentally trigger a dimensional crossing when I didn’t mean to, that’s more of a problem.

The air around me got hot, then cold, then very, very still, like it had forgotten the way movement was supposed to work. It got difficult to breathe. This was all normal. I’d added the hooks to the basic rune that should tell it to take me back to the dimension I’d left the most recently, regardless of direction or distance. It was a risky move.

Dimensions aren’t organized in a neat stack, like the layers of a lasagna, or even in beehive hexes, although some of the more scientifically-inclined travelers I’ve met have tried to use that model to explain cosmology, like something this big and complicated and messy would ever be that straightforward when it didn’t have to be. Near as I can tell, reality is less like lasagna and more like a body. Sure, it has layers and divisions and strata and necessary membranes to keep your liver from winding up in your stomach or something, but it’s alive. Pieces move. I was essentially aiming for a single blood cell that had been moving since the moment I activated my emergency outand fled, and since I didn’t know where I was going, I had to trust the magic not to miss.

That meant I had to trust my own crappy handwriting, and the enchantments on a pot of ink that had been sitting unattended in the basement for months. If I’d gotten any piece of the process wrong, this moment could be the end of me.

That didn’t make it special. The pressure in my chest got worse, and I opened my eyes to find myself standing in the Buckley Township Children’s Library, surrounded by bookshelves packed with brightly colored volumes. The piping voices of children pretending to be quiet drifted through the air. I tensed.

Whatever mechanism triggers these flashbacks when I cross a dimensional membrane, it rarely lets me see Thomas. It never lets me see my children. It never takes mehome. Instead, it seems to take me to whatever will upset me the most—and it never takes me to the same place twice. I remembered this day. I always remembered them.

I had time to take a deep breath before familiar footsteps came thundering down the hall connecting us to the main library. I spun toward it, following a script set sixty years before, an artificial smile plastered on my face.

“Daddy,” I said warmly. “How nice to see you. Did you need something from the children’s section?”

“Alice Enid Healy,” he snapped, grabbing my arm and yanking me toward him. The action pressed against a bruise I had almost forgotten in the intervening years, and I hissed through my teeth, trying to pull away.

That only made him pull me closer, the same way it always had.

“You were in the woods again last night,” he said, voice a sepulcher rumble, like he was laying down a proclamation of my own damnation. “Youknowhow I feel about you sneaking out and risking your life.”

“The Galway needs me,” I protested. “It’s not sneaking out. It’s—it’s goinghome.”

He released me so abruptly that I stumbled backward, bumping my hip against a low bookshelf. He stayed exactly where he was, and I knew that he had framed this entire confrontation so that anyone watching us would see a superior scolding an employee, within the reasonable limits of their position.

I hated him. He was my father, and I loved him, and I hated him.

“Our house isn’t home?” he asked, tone just on the edge of mocking. “Your grandparents would be so ashamed to hear that from you.”

I squeezed my eyes shut before anyone in the library could see mecry and felt the air around me shift as the transition between dimensions finally concluded itself. Opening my eyes, I fell into a defensive crouch. It would look ridiculous if I’d appeared on a calm street corner or in the middle of a children’s birthday party—both things that have happened more than once—but it might save my life if I’d dropped onto a battlefield.

I was standing on a low, rocky bluff surrounded by sheer hillsides. Scrubby thornbushes grew on every flat surface, almost dense enough to count as bracken. My charms may not give me much leeway in the steering department, but they’re pretty good about not materializing me inside things, and that’s good enough. They took some time to refine to that degree, and there were several times early in, where I’d returned to base early with something embedded in my calf or shoulder. I would have died if I’d ever caught a piece of the local landscape in the throat. Good thing I didn’t.

Naga likes to say that luck is on my side and coincidence loves me. I can’t really argue with that, even as I get the shit kicked out of me on a regular basis. I crouched lower, taking stock of my surroundings.

It was night, the sky bright above me with the swirls of what I would have called the aurora borealis if I’d been on Earth, bands of color dancing through the air and reducing the stars to bit players in their own nightly performance. Three moons capped off the image. There was no visible light pollution. It wasn’t because we were too far from the city; it was because Helos was more focused on magic than technology and had never centralized their society in urban spaces the way we did back home.

That, and the dominant species was made up of viciously aggressive seven-foot–tall assholes with anger management issues who didn’t like to live in large groups. It made them cranky, and when you’re already talking about people who have twenty-eight words for “wound” but only two for “friend,” you don’t want to deal with them when they get cranky. They mostly formed small settlements a decent remove from one another and waged small, violent wars against their neighbors, complete with the occasional bout of recreational arson.

Nice folks. Unfortunately for me, Helos was an artery, for lack of a better way to describe it: from here, I could go off in half a dozen directions, some of which were inaccessible from Earth. I’d been here often enough to start developing a reputation, which was where the original problem had started.

But they didn’t get to break my leg and keep my pack. It just wasn’t allowed.

Moving closer to the bluff’s edge, I looked down at the rocky landscape. Nothing moved. This dimension didn’t have many local predators; the local sapients had long since wiped them all out, and there wasn’t much bigger than a rat that could cause me any issues. I still stayed low as I began picking my way down the slope, taking it slow and easy. I didn’t need to break another bone when I only had one crossing left on my arm; I could justify one detour for the sake of my stuff. Two would be pushing it.

The flickering light of a campfire burned about halfway down the slope. It was hard to tell from here how level the ground was around it, but I had to assume at least level enough that they wouldn’t have to constantly be chasing embers as they rolled down the hill. The laws of combustion and gravity aren’t consistent across dimensions, but they worked in this one about the way they did back at home, and no one enjoys an uncontrolled brush fire. Shapes around the light told me my former assailants were relaxing in their evening, probably smugly confident that nothing was going to give them any trouble.

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