Page 9 of Spelunking Through Hell

That’s me. I’m nothing. And I was going to give them all the trouble they could carry.

Reputation aside, I generally don’t kill people without good reason—and yes, being paid to do it can constitute good reason, although I don’t pull a single trigger without confirming what I’ve been hired to do. I’m a bounty hunter, not an assassin, even if some languages use the same word for both, and some people can’t see the difference. I don’t kidnap people; I bring them to justice. I also help people get home after they’ve been yanked into dimensions that aren’t their own. All the charms that let me cross dimensions are designed to carry at least two, and most of them allow for three, since for a long time I was traveling with a pair of Aeslin mice from my clergy.

It was my granddaughter Antimony, the one who told me I was right and Thomas was potentially alive somewhere, who called me on the fact that if I was traveling with two mice and hoping to bring my husband home, my charms should have been set to four. I’ve been losing hope for a long time. Fifty years is longer than any human should spend on this kind of fruitless quest, and even if I’m physically in about as perfect shape as it’s possible for a person to be, I’m tired. I want to go home.

It’s just that home is rarely a place. It’s a combination of conditions. For me, home requires the Buckley woods, and the mice in the attic, and the tailypo in the trees outside the window, and Thomas by my side. I’ve been lost since the night he left me, and until I can be surethat he’s gone for good, I can’t start building something new. It’s just not possible.

The size of the locals meant it was easier for me to crouch and pick my slow way through the darkness toward them. I didn’t even have to take particular care to stay under cover. There was virtually nothing my size left in this dimension except for their own children, and that meant if they saw me at all, they wouldn’t register me as a threat. There was enough cover, thanks to the darkness, the unpredictable flickering motion of the sky, and the brush, for me to descend without much chance of being seen as long as I was careful.

And I was very careful indeed. According to the mice, my mother never learned to be careful, and I guess that’s the one thing I can say I definitely do better than she did. I crept downward one easy step at a time, placing my feet with exquisite slowness to avoid kicking loose pebbles, and hoped I wouldn’t step on anything that made too much noise for them to brush off.

The trick to sneaking up on people isn’t total silence. It’s making sure the noise you can’t avoid making fits into your environment. I crept closer and closer, not stopping when something rustled, but stepping carefully to the side, so that anyone looking toward the sound would be looking at where I’d been and not where I was.

When I was almost there, I unholstered my revolvers and balanced them lightly in my hands. The residents of Helos were big and fast and proportionately strong. They could break me in half if they got hold of me, which meant my preference for blunt force trauma couldn’t come to the party. But they weren’t resistant to bullets. That was the sole saving grace of a world that was otherwise pretty unpleasant. No good food, no good conversation, no local culture bigger than the equivalent of a few assholes yelling at each other across a puddle of blood, just an easy conduit to some useful pathways, and people who died when you shot them.

People I would have been perfectly happy to leave alone if they hadn’t insisted on jumping me first. Killing folks for fun isn’t my gig, no matter how inconvenient they may be. I know my rep says otherwise, but believe me, if I’d been in this game to bathe the multiverse in blood, things would have gotten a lot stickier a long, long time ago.

Revolver in each hand, I stepped up to the edge of the firelight and smiled my sweetest smile, the one that used to convince my father I was a sheltered darling who would never so much as dream of crossing any of the arbitrary lines he’d drawn around what I was and was notallowed to expect from the world. The two locals with a direct line of sight on me quailed, leaning back in silent shock.

“Howdy, boys,” I said. “I believe you’ve got a few things that belong to me. Now, if you want to give them back, we can settle this without any more bloodshed. If you’d prefer to argue about possession being nine tenths of the law, like assholes always seem to want to do, we can get violent.”

The man who’d been their leader when they jumped me before stood up, and kept on standing until his full, substantial height had unspooled from the ground. He turned to face me, smirking, already so sure how this whole scene was going to play out.

“You shouldn’t have come back here, little thing,” he said, voice rough and irregular as the ground around us. “Little things ought to stay broken the first time it happens, to show they’re paying proper attention. Now I’m going to have to break you again.”

I sighed and shot him in the knee. Very few bipedal things can stay standing with a bullet in their knee. It’s just physics. He yelled and went down hard, and his companions began to rise, reaching for their own weapons as I sighed.

“Guess we’re doing this,” I said. “Come on, boys. I need to get home before morning, so let’s make it quick.”

The locals, as I’ve mentioned, stand about seven feet tall on average and don’t care for the company of strangers, or their own kind, or much of anybody else. It seems to be a biological thing; get more than about a dozen of them in one place and they’ll just start eating each other. I don’t think most humans realize how lucky we are to have evolved from primates, who tend to be social and get along with each other. There’s a lot of talk about how humans are inherently aggressive and will always devolve into conflict, but at the end of the day, we’re the cosmic equivalent of puppies. We trip over our own feet and try to make friends with everything we meet.

These folks didn’t evolve from primates. These folks didn’t evolve frommammals. Seven feet tall, yeah, with pebbled black-and-orange skin and yellow eyes, like giant Gila monsters. They even have the hooked claws and stubby tails, although those were more decorative than dangerous. When they scratched, it was like being hit by somebody who’d had a really intensive manicure, not like being slashed with multiple biological knives. I was pretty sure they’d heldonto them solely because with that skin, fingernails alone wouldn’t have been enough for them to scratch anything that itched.

But that was ascribing intent to evolution again, which is one of my worst habits, and something I should probably work on. With their leader on the ground, clutching his knee, the other two he’d been sitting with were on their feet, one holding a nasty-looking machete, the other a length of chain.

Because oh, right, that’s the other thing I should probably mention. Without any real population centers, they don’t really produce much for themselves; it’s hard to run a manufacturing plant, or even a smithy, when everyone keeps killing everyone else. So the locals mostly equip themselves by mugging helpless passers-through. Turns out there’s a lot more cross-dimensional traffic than I would ever have guessed back when I thought Earth was actually important, and not the dimensional equivalent of that one neighborhood where all the weirdoes wind up living.

I mean, Earthisimportant, becauseeverywhereis important. Nowhere matters as much as your hometown. That’s another thing we get from our primate roots. We prioritize the familiar, we know what’s “home,” and we defend it as much as we possibly can. We form a circle around family, and we take care of it.

But in the greater cosmic sense of things, Earth is no more important than anyplace else, including this shitty little pass-through reality, with its giant asshole scavenger lizards who figured out that sometimes when people walked through their yard, they could knock those people down and take their shit. Which was how I’d been hired to swing through here in the first place. They’d mugged some tourists who took the wrong route between destinations, and the tourists in question wanted their shit back.

Which was currently less important to me than gettingmyshit back, but which I’d be perfectly happy to pick up also if I had the chance. It’s always good to keep the customers happy. The one with the chain muttered something in the local language, beginning to spin it in a menacing fashion, so I did the only thing that made any sense.

I shot him in the throat.

De-escalation makes sense when you’re just getting started. Maybe there’s a chance you can work things out, so everybody gets away. Maybe this isn’t one of those days where you add another bloodstain to your soul. Maybe. But there had been fifteen of these fuckers when they jumped me, and they’d been down to five when I whisked myself away, blood in my eyes and radiant pain all through my bones. Nowthey seemed to be down to three, which either meant the others had been wounded too badly to be worth taking care of, or they had been waiting for me to come back.

None of them looked surprised enough, within their limited reptilian range, for the former to have been true, which was annoying. I’m happier when I don’t have to worry about people coming up behind me. But the one with the machete was looking at his fallen companions, the one still writhing and clutching at his knee, the other motionless in the dirt. Not everything is allergic to bullets. For most things that are, a throat shot will settle things with gratifying speed.

“Do wereallyhave to do this?” I demanded. Machete guy looked past me, face relaxing marginally, and I ducked just in time for something that looked like a morning star with delusions of grandeur to whisk over my head. Dammit. Our other players were coming to the party.

At least if they were all here, I could be relatively sure my stuff was nearby. I took advantage of my bent position to put two more bullets in leader guy, before running straight toward machete guy like I thought that was somehow a good idea. He only looked surprised for an instant before he squared his stance and raised his weapon, clearly expecting me to run myself straight into it. What a charmer.

Instead, I whipped around and flung myself toward their fire, leaping over it and skidding to a stop on the other side. I was supposed to be injured. Even if they didn’t have a detailed understanding of human biology, they knew enough to know I shouldn’t be this spry, and they weren’t expecting me to dodge. Machete guy snarled as he pivoted to advance toward me.

Issue with the machete as a primary melee weapon: it’s not very aerodynamic. He was still holding onto it, clearly intending to do some hacking. I holstered one gun and produced a hand’s-worth of throwing knives and tossed them his way, hard enough to break through his layer of natural scaled armor. Only one actually hit an eye. His scream was more like a bellow. The other two knives went wild. I’d have to retrieve those later.

Two more shots and my first gun was exhausted, but he was on the ground, not moving, and I only had two more partners for this little dance. I shoved the gun into its holster, trading it for its twin as I whipped around. The opponent with the morning star was coming up on me fast, almost back in range for another shot, and he’d been joined by a companion, who was holding something that looked a lot like a javelin. Oh, that was going to hurt if it hit me.

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