Page 4 of Backpacking through Bedlam

One of the tentacles snapped like a whip, almost brushing the front rank of guards. They gasped but held their ground, refusing to be intimidated. Okay, that was it. I stomped my foot as hard as I could, hoping the vibrations would make me seem like a better target. “Hey, ugly!”

That wasn’t very nice of me. Maybe this thing was the most attractive bundle of tentacles in the whole dimension, and all the other bundles of tentacles wanted to come over to its horrifying underground lair for the local equivalent of coffee. But the thing was trying to hit my people, and I didn’t like that.

Fortunately, I’d been right about the vibrations. The tentacles stopped lashing out at the guards and reoriented to lash out at me, leaving me to jump and dodge in to avoid being smacked upside the head. I didn’t shoot. I wasn’t entirely sure bullets would do me any good against this thing; I wanted to get more of it aboveground before I started trying to hurt it.

Thomas—the husband I mentioned before—shouted something. I glanced toward him, distracted. Only for a second. Maybe only half a second. It was long enough.

The next thrashing tentacle caught me square across the stomach and sent me flying backward, stopping only when my back found a convenient rock wall. I slammed into it hard enough to send my diaphragm into a spasm. Unable to catch my breath, I slid limply to the ground, where I blacked out.

So yeah. Just another normal day in paradise.

It was at least a brief loss of consciousness, since the scene was basically the same and my ears were still ringing when I woke up. My back ached, but not enough to indicate that I’d broken anything; at most, I might’ve cracked a rib and just not been able to feel it yet. That was fine. I don’t think I have any ribs left that I haven’t cracked at least once, and most of them are in the frequent-flier club.

The impact had also knocked my revolvers out of my hands, which was a much bigger problem than knocking the air out of my lungs: air is replaceable. My revolvers, which used to belong to my mother, are not. I shoved myself to a standing position, scanning the ground until I found them, and bolted forward. The tentacles were still flailing wildly, but I should be able to get to the guns before I got smacked again. If not, well. I bounce.

Thomas was shouting again, although I couldn’t make out quite what he was saying. This time, I kept my eyes on my goal, refusing to let myself be distracted. If this thing wasn’t going to back down, I was going to make it back down.

I don’t know what it was about the run of dimensions we’d been in for the last few weeks, but they all seemed to think megafauna was an absolutely fabulous idea, yes, good, let’s make more of it. When we got back to Ithaca, I was going to have a serious sit-down with Phoebe and Helen about what, exactly, they had been thinking when they said this was a good direction to find uninhabited worlds that might be suitable for our bottle universe refugees.

And this is all getting a bit confusing, so hey, let’s pause in the middle of a pitched battle against a giant tentacle monster—or monsters, as the case might be—and agree on the basics. My name is Alice Enid Price-Healy. I spent fifty-five years as the unwitting hunting dog of a serpentine asshole who thought sending me in the wrong direction was morally acceptable, and my reward was finding the husband everyone had been trying to tell me was long since dead and buried. Turned out he was just fine, for values of “fine” that include “trapped in an inescapable bottle dimension, magically exhausting himself trying to keep the place from collapsing while he’s still inside it.” Since I’d been fine for a value of “fine” that meant “allowing myself to be regularly skinned alive in order to stay healthy enough to keep looking for my husband,” I couldn’t exactly get mad about the situation. Although I could certainly grumble about it whenever the opportunity arose.

See, fifty-five years ago, the bargain Thomas made with a horrifying supernatural entity we called “the crossroads” came due, and he was ripped away from the life we’d been building together and thrown across a few dozen dimensional barriers to wind up in that bottle dimension, which was actually the rotting, cast-off corpse of the world the crossroads originally came from, or something close to the world they originally came from—it’s hard to be sure when you’re talking about centuries of time and multiple dimensions of distance. He’d been too far away to get a message to me, and too trapped to make it home, and so I’d done the sensible thing, for certain definitions of “sensible,” and gone charging after him.

We’d had two small children when that happened, and I’d passed them off to my best friend, Laura Campbell, with the promise that I’d be back as soon as I could. Well, I’d kept my word on that, it just turned out that “as soon as I could” was more than fifty years, thanks to the serpentine asshole I mentioned before.

Naga was a Professor of Extra-Dimensional Studies at the University of K’larth. We met when I was just a little kid. He’d been summoned by a group of snake cultists who’d believed he was their god and could grant them infinite power, and I’d been kidnapped as a sacrifice by the same group. Big mistake. Both parts, really. Naga wasn’t a god, just a frustrated academic who didn’t like cultists, and while I had a pissed-off mother with a big gun and a ghost babysitter, neither of whom was going to sit idly by while I got fed to a giant snake.

Naga and I survived that night. The snake cultists didn’t. We’d stayed in touch while I was growing up, communicating through a mail system I didn’t entirely understand but appreciated all the same. There had been times, in the gap between coming home from college and my father’s death, where Naga’s letters had been all that kept me sane. So I’d trusted him. Of course I’d trusted him. He was my friend.

My friend who, as soon as he had the opportunity, started lying to me, intentionally steering me away from the path most likely to reunite me with my husband, keeping me from my children until they became adults with their own lives and their own children and no need or desire to have me around.

My friend, who let me spend fifty years thinking maybe everyone I loved was right when they told me I was chasing a ghost, that I was never going to find him because he wasn’t out there anymore. My friend who—and this is the best part—convinced me to let him have me skinned alive over and over again so he could collect the magical membrane that adhered to my skin every time I pushed my way through the wall between dimensions.

Yeah. Great guy, Naga. I almost wish I hadn’t let Thomas kill him. Only almost, and only because the more time I have to think about what he did to me—to us—the more I wish I’d been able to kill him myself.

But that’s water under the temporal bridge. I went the direction Naga didn’t want me going, and I found Thomas, just like I always said I was going to. Thanks to the wonders of magic, he was almost the same physical age he’d been when he vanished. I would have been happy married to a man in his nineties, but being able to skip that in favor of us both being young enough to survive getting out of the bottle dimension had been a bonus. So we were finally together, and we were going to get our happy ending, right? Right?

Wrong. So, so wrong. Because while he’d been locked in that bottle dimension, Thomas had essentially become a dynastic warlord, with a whole community of people who depended on him. All of them were either victims of their own crossroads bargains or descended from victims, and none of them deserved to be left behind to die there. Meaning that when we’d managed to get out, we’d done it with just over three hundred refugees in tow, and none of them had been equipped to strike out on their own.

Some friends of mine from Ithaca, Helen and Phoebe, had offered to give us a helping hand, in the form of supplies, various charms that would boost Thomas’s natural ability to open doors between worlds, and a map that would help us get the ones who could go home back to their original dimensions, and find places where the ones who didn’t have anywhere to go back to could settle down and figure out what they wanted to do with their lives. And that’s what we’d been doing. Hence the megafauna parade and tentacle party.

We’d managed to shed nearly two hundred people during the trip, returning them to their homes or finding places where they wouldn’t encroach on other intelligent life, and I was exhausted. With more than a hundred people left to resettle, it was starting to feel like this was another quest that was never going to end, and Thomas and I were never going to have a moment to ourselves.

“I got it!” shouted a female voice, heavy with a Maine accent, right before a human woman in her early twenties ran past me, a spear clutched in both hands. I snapped upright, gripping my guns, and watched her run. The tentacles between us weren’t thrashing anymore; something seemed to be pinning them to the ground, where they strained against the unseen force.

I glanced to the side. There was Thomas, hands raised and face set in a grimace as he focused his sorcery on keeping the thing from hitting Sally. A small, unpleasant part of me pointed out that if he could do that, he could have been doing it before, but hadn’t bothered when I’d been the one in danger. I shoved that part down as hard as I could. The fact that I’d been chasing a fairy tale ending for fifty years didn’t mean anybody owed me one. It certainly didn’t mean Thomas could be blamed for saving the girl who had become his daughter in all but literal blood rather than his still semi-unfamiliar wife.

It didn’t. It couldn’t. It was unfair of me to think that it did, and so I wasn’t going to think that, no matter how hard circumstances tried to make me.

Sally leapt, spear held overhead in a classic javelineer’s pose, and stabbed viciously downward. There was an offended bellow from the pit—the first sound we’d heard since the tentacles erupted from the ground—and they began to retreat, leaving Sally stumbling back from the edge of the hole, spear still clutched in both hands.

Panting, she turned to face me, a small, cocky smile on her face. “Thanks for the assist,” she said, and strolled back toward where Thomas was standing. His hands weren’t raised anymore. They were resting on his knees as he bent forward, panting slightly. Every dimension we went to had a different pneuma, and the pneuma was what fueled his magic.

Thomas is a sorcerer, a form of naturally occurring human witch who can tap into the pneuma of a world and use it to make the laws of physics sit, stay, roll over, and play dead. When we were together the first time, he mostly used it to move things from one place to another, start small fires, and occasionally keep me from falling out of bed when we got too enthusiastic. What’s the point of being able to move things with your mind if you can’t use it to keep your wife from bruising her ass on the floor, right?

Well, his time in the bottle dimension, where there was no native pneuma to draw on, had forced him to become a lot more innovative, and a lot more efficient about how he used power. Moving to a new dimension might throw him off-balance for a little bit, hence the panting, but once he recovered, he could do more with less than he had ever been able to accomplish before. Hence simple telekinesis becoming “I can restrain a whole-ass tentacle monster before it eats anybody.” It was a pretty nice upgrade, all things considered.

The guards lowered their spears, turning to make reassuring noises to the other refugees as I holstered my pistols and cautiously approached the edge of the hole. Thomas watched me warily but didn’t say anything. He knew better than to tell a Healy not to investigate a natural phenomenon.