Page 11 of Backpacking through Bedlam

“Bat the size of a horse? They might as well be.” She shrugged. “If it’s the nastiest thing we have to worry about tonight, we’ll be fine. Boss just needs to get some sleep so he can refill his tank, and then we’re off to the next world on the line.”

“Where is he?”

Sally blinked. “I thought he was with you.”

“You came to our tent and told him there was a problem,” I said. “He left right away. Didn’t you see him?”

“Yeah, but . . .” She paused. “Aw, fuck.”

Still gripping her spear—which was part weapon, part security blanket, part teddy bear as far as she was concerned—Sally spun and ran out of the tent, leaving me behind. I was getting real tired of that. I sighed heavily, drew my revolvers, and followed.

The camp was quiet. The sound of leathery wings passed by again overhead, and I looked up, slow and easy. Bats hunt by sound. Because of that, they always know where you’re going to be; they can echolocate your new location before you finish figuring out where it’s going to be. Bats seem a lot like sorcery, when you get right down to it. I don’t understand them, and I’m not sure anyone really does.

The night was otherwise silent. No birds or hunting predators; only the crackle of untended fires, the whistle of the wind across the plain, and the occasional beat of wings from overhead. The air was cool and pleasant. It would have been nice out, if not for the omnipresent threat of a giant flying rodent swooping down and taking off with me.

It was a shame this world didn’t have any known intelligent inhabitants. I would have loved the chance to get my hands on a few biology textbooks, just to find out whether this was an “all megafauna, all the time” reality, or whether it just liked really, really big rodents.

Sally was right, though. At this size, my guns weren’t going to do me a lot of good. They’d probably be able to convince the bat that I was too much trouble to eat, but they wouldn’t knock it out of the sky. Still, that was something, and as a creature that ran entirely on instinct, it wasn’t as likely to redouble its attack if I hurt it as a thinking creature would have been. I moved quickly, eyes on the sky, waiting for the bat to show itself.

It didn’t do me the honor. Fucker.

Thomas could take care of himself. All sorcerers are elementalists at their core—that seems to be the main thing distinguishing them from all the other types of human witch—and Thomas’s element was fire. If he’d been able to pull on this world’s pneuma enough to pin down the mole, he could definitely pull on it enough to make a few sparks. Add that to the campfires burning everywhere, and well. If the bat attempted to mess with him, it would get to be the guest of honor at a very exclusive barbecue.

Problem: Thomas was our only sorcerer. None of the rest of us had any talent for channeling magical energy. I was blocked from even benefitting from the stuff, thanks to having been used as a channel for the spell that broke us out of the bottle dimension, nearly killing me in the process. (Thomas would contest the “nearly,” since my heart stopped at one point and had to be shocked back into a normal rhythm. Thomas can be a little conservative sometimes.) If he used the pneuma he’d been able to draw from this dimension to set the bat on fire, we’d be stuck here longer before he could open another gateway, and we’d risk running into even more bats. Not good.

So no, we didn’t want Thomas to be the one dealing with this if there was any possible alternative. I kept working my way through the camp, back to our tent—and more importantly, my pack.

With a flap of heavy leather wings, the bat soared into view. I opened fire immediately, and true to Sally’s prediction, the thing kept flying. But it shrieked, the sound high-pitched enough to hurt my ears, and banked, heading back the other way. My bullets might only feel like beestings to something that size, but no one likes being stung by a bee.

“Thomas?” I pushed open the flap of our tent and stuck my head inside. No wayward husband. I hadn’t really been expecting him; wherever he’d gone off to after getting separated from Sally, it wouldn’t make sense for him to come right back here.

The mice were still in the middle of their ritual, tiny voices raised in celebration. They didn’t even pause to mark my arrival, which meant they were probably at a delicate point in the recitation. I holstered my guns and moved to open my pack, digging quickly through its contents before finding what I needed and straightening up again.

“There’s going to be a big boom in a few minutes,” I said. “Don’t get alarmed. It’s just me doing my job.”

The mice cheered and went back to what they’d been doing, my comment already dismissed. I smiled and let myself out of the tent. Sometimes it’s nice when things stay predictable. Giant bats eat people; talking pantheistic rodents care more about religious rituals than they do about explosions; if I’m around, something’s going to blow up.

No one else had emerged from their tents, all of them being somewhat smarter than that. I walked with my eyes on the sky, heading for the edge of the encampment. The farther I got from the fires, the darker it became. The sky was an unending blaze of stars above me, bright in that way that only preindustrial dimensions can ever manage. I was going to miss those skies once we were home for keeps. Not enough to make this trip last any longer than it absolutely had to, but still . . .

The first time I’d been able to catch my breath and look at a sky like that, I’d been in some unnamed backwater dimension two jumps from Ithaca, chasing down a bounty Naga had assigned to me. The man in question had robbed an important family back on his home world and somehow done a runner across dimensions, trying to disappear. Maybe that would have been allowed, except that he’d stolen some fairly important family heirlooms, and the people they actually belonged to wanted them back, along with a side order of punishment for the thief. They’d been paying Naga, and Naga hadn’t been paying me, exactly, more letting me do him a favor in exchange for his continuing to fund my fruitless search for my husband.

Those memories were less comforting now than they’d been when I truly believed Naga was on my side, but they had been pleasant enough while they were happening. The bounties had given me something limited and achievable to focus on rather than spending all my time and energy thinking about the thing I couldn’t seem to achieve, and the money Naga got for sending me on side trips funded more tattoos and more weapons for me to take with me when I got back on the main mission.

Only now I had to question every choice I’d made during those fifty years. Had I been hunting criminals, or had I been dragging innocent people and runaways to their dooms? Was I a bounty hunter or a hired thug? Either would explain the way some people reacted when they saw me, but only the first would help me sleep at night.

Still, I loved an untouched sky. I made it past the edge of the tent line, spread my arms, and began walking in a slow circle, eyes still turned upward. I wanted to attract attention, not be caught unawares. Just to up the ante, I started whistling, the sound low and carrying in the calm night air. Any hunter nearby wouldn’t be able to resist.

Indeed, there was a flap of wings as the bat—or another like it, but hopefully the same one that had been stalking me before—began to loop lazily overhead. I amended my hopes. This was definitely the same bat. It was keeping its distance because I’d taught it I might be dangerous, but as I continued to walk and whistle, it swooped closer with each pass, clearly thinking I hadn’t seen it.

That was good. I kept up my circles, waiting for it to work up the nerve to make an attack.

When it did, it was fast enough that it very nearly caught me off-guard. It went into a sharp dive, mouth open, arrowing straight toward me like it was going to swallow me in one bite, even though it wasn’t quite large enough for that. It wasn’t the primary hunting strategy employed by Earth bats, which usually preferred to snatch things out of the air, and I was briefly glad we were dealing with giant monster bats instead of giant monster owls. Owls come equipped with special feathers that let them fly without making a sound. We would have lost people before we knew what was going on, and more, this little tactic would have been suicidal, not slightly risky.

The bat dove. I hit the ground, yanking the pin from the grenade in my hand and tossing it straight into the bat’s open mouth as I fell. Its jaw snapped shut, and I would have sworn it looked surprised by the offering, startled enough by my weird behavior not to go for a second immediate swoop.

It didn’t spit the grenade out. That was good. I covered my head with my arms but didn’t get off the ground or run, not wanting to make myself a better target.

Which was, naturally, when Sally and Thomas emerged from the tent line, saw me, and ran in my direction. “Alice!” shouted Thomas.