“First rule of dealing with Alice: never tell her to be careful. The more you tell her to be careful, the less she’s going to be, because she hates it that much. I don’t even think she does it on purpose. She’s just stubborn by nature.”
—Mary Dunlavy
Setting up a tent, alone, on top of a big rock in an unfamiliar dimension. Which is not a new occurrence, strange as that might seem
THERE’S A TRICK TO pitching a tent when you can’t drive your tentpoles into anything, and weirdly enough, it comes down, again, to railroad spikes. Tying the ropes to the spikes can create enough of a counterweight to get the whole structure up and stable.
I’m an old hand when it comes to setting up camp. I got the tent I was hopefully going to be sharing with Thomas up by myself, in less than ten minutes, set the mice free to perform whatever rituals they thought would make the space safer for us to spend the night in, and went looking for people who needed help setting up their own shelter.
I found plenty. Most of these folks had never been expected to make their own decisions before our cross-dimensional march began, much less had the luxury of worrying about things like “something soft to sleep on” and “not getting rained out.” They’d lived where their warlords told them to, slept where their warlords told them to sleep, and used what they were given rather than putting anything together for themselves. Now that they were my responsibility—well, Thomas’s responsibility, but that made them half-mine as far as I was concerned—they were learning about those things, and they needed their hands held a lot of the time.
It wasn’t long before a veritable tent city had sprung up on top of the rock. Children ran between makeshift shelters, shrieking and throwing balls of wadded-up fabric back and forth. They could find something to play with no matter where we were. I envied that about them. The sun was dipping lower in the sky, and campfires were starting to wink on like tiny stars as people settled in and started preparing their dinners.
And Thomas still hadn’t come to find me.
Our tent was set up near the center of the cluster, and not by design; I would have preferred to be closer to the edge, where I could play sentry and be sure nothing was going to get to the children or the elderly without going through me first. But these people saw Thomas as their savior, and me as his beloved wife. They wanted to be close to us, which meant we would always wind up dead in the middle when something like this happened.
One more reason to be eager to get them wherever it was they were going to wind up. We’d never have any real privacy until we did.
I looked around the bustling encampment, trying to find any sign of him, and when I didn’t, I shook my head, grabbed a lantern, and went back into the tent.
The mice had pulled a bunch of fabric scraps, sticks, and rocks into a rough circle and were putting on some sort of complicated pantomime. I stopped, blinking, as I reviewed the rituals I knew were normally performed around this time. Nothing sprang to mind. Finally, I asked, “What are you doing?”
“Priestess!” exalted one of my mice, and the other three joined in, all four of them cheering jubilantly at my return.
“Well, at least you’re glad to see me.” I hung my lantern from the hook on the central pole, filling the tent with a diffuse yellow glow. “So what’s the ritual? I don’t recognize it.”
“This is the Holy Rite of A Spotter Is Better Than the Alternative, Priestess,” said the mouse in Sally’s livery. “It is a newer mystery but still considered essential to understanding the relationship between the Precise Priestess and her consort!”
So one of the rituals about Annie and her Sam, then. Huh. “Why’s he not a god yet?” I asked.
“Priestess?”
“Sam’s a good boy, and he’s devoted to my granddaughter like a dog’s devoted to a bone. He’s not going anywhere any time soon. So why’s he a consort and not a god?”
“When the clergy of the Precise Priestess did begin to discuss his deification, she did appear before them most wrathful, and say, lo, ‘I Want Him To Stick Around, You Meddling Rodents, and You Marrying Us Off Before He’s Even Met My Siblings Won’t Help.’ This caused a Theological Debate among the colony, and we agreed that as each new god or priestess is either born to the family or Pledged to them, we could wait to decide his godhood until he had Pledged properly.”
The other mice murmured agreement. I snorted.
“Glad to see that you can take feedback from the family,” I said. “What about Sally?”
The mice looked perplexed. “The Conscripted Priestess has already been Pledged.”
“I wonder if she’s aware of that,” said Thomas.
I turned, and he was standing behind me, just inside the tent, looking unsure, like he wasn’t confident he’d be welcomed. I straightened, standing to meet him.
“Guess you found the tent,” I said. “I put it up by myself. I was real careful.”
“Alice—” he began.
“You know how I feel about that word,” I snapped. “My father always told me to be careful.”
“Because your father—and oh God, I can’t believe I’m saying something that makes it sound like I agreed with him, about anything, ever, but—your father loved you, and he didn’t want you getting hurt.”
“Guess you found the wrong tent,” I said, and moved to push past him to the exit.
He grabbed my shoulders before I made it more than a few steps.
“Alice, please,” he said.
I turned until we were eye to eye, my jaw set in a stubborn line. He looked back at me, nowhere near so stubborn. His own expression was more one of raw confusion, discomfort and desire warring for possession of his face.
“I spent fifty years thinking I was never going to see you again,” he said, miserably. “Fifty years imagining you alone, abandoned, hating me for leaving you . . . my only comfort was knowing that my deal with the crossroads precluded you making any deals of your own, and even that was a cold comfort, because it was possible the crossroads might declare my exile meant our agreement was fulfilled and they could do whatever they wanted. Fifty years of assassins wearing your face, coming to kill me because they could, because they’d been told it would wipe their own slates clean, sometimes just because they wanted to. Fifty years of missing you.”
“I had fifty years of missing you too,” I said, my own voice stiff.
“You had fifty years and a purpose,” he said. “You were going to find me if it killed you. I didn’t have that. I couldn’t get out. You might as well have been dead, for all the chance there was of me seeing you again. And then, sweet miracle, you fell out of the sky into my own backyard! You were there, alive and still looking for me. You wanted to be with me, after everything. After all the bad decisions, after leaving you, you still wanted me.”
“I still do,” I said, almost in a whisper.
“I thought I was never going to see you again,” he said, and took the hand off my left shoulder, moving to cup my cheek instead. Instinctively, I leaned into his touch. “Can you blame me for not wanting to see you hurt?”
“You don’t tell Sally to be careful.” It sounded petulant even to my own ears. I didn’t pull away.
“Sally is careful, compared to you,” he said. “She doesn’t consider herself indestructible. She knows she can be hurt, and she knows that if she is, it could take her a long time to heal. When she throws herself at something, it’s because she’s already looked at the options and decided on the one that carries the least risk. She’s being tactical.”
“You’re saying I’m not a tactical thinker?”
“No, darling, I’m saying you spent so long being able to bounce back from absolutely anything that you’ve forgotten what it means to have consequences for your actions. Your body can’t handle magical healing right now.”
“We didn’t have magical healing back in Buckley.”
“No, we didn’t. Remember how much time you spent injured, or recovering? Remember how long you were too weak to go to the woods after the slime attacked you?”
I did, unfortunately. I turned my face away, hoping he wouldn’t see the way I winced.
It was a futile hope. Thomas had always paid too much attention to the things I least wanted him to be paying attention to.
“I remember how hard it was on you, and how much you hated it.” He ran his thumb along the line of my cheekbone, palm still cupping my face. “I remember how much I wanted to help, and how I wasn’t allowed. I think it hurt us both, seeing you like that, and I’m sorry, but I never want to see you like that again. If that means reminding you that you’re as mortal as the rest of us, I won’t be able to help myself.”
I turned my head to kiss his palm, then straightened, meeting his eyes again. “I don’t like how you’ve started telling me what to do. I’m not one of your subjects. I don’t take orders from you.”
“And I’m sorry about that, too. Why don’t we make an agreement, you and I? I’ll do my best not to give orders—I’m unlearning the habit of autocracy, just like you’re unlearning the habit of throwing yourself into danger like a woman who never expects to have backup again—and you’ll do your best not to get hurt. You’re the most precious thing in the world to me, Alice. That you were able to stay in one piece long enough to find me and bring me home is a miracle. Losing you now would be . . .” Thomas stopped and shook his head, finally pulling his hand away. “I can’t even think about it. Please, for the sake of my heart, can you try?”
It all made too much sense when he put it that way. I looked at the wall of the tent and sighed. “I can try,” I said, and looked back to him. “But you need to remember that I’m your wife, not one of your people to order around, and at this point, I have more experience with dimensional travel than you do.”
Sure, my experience was full of unexpected holes, thanks to Naga’s pet telepaths digging out whatever information he thought would be too inconvenient for me to have, but it was still experience. While Thomas had been in one hostile death world dimension for fifty years, I’d been running through hundreds of them, and I hadn’t died. That sort of track record had to be good for something.
“All right,” he said, and smiled. I hesitated, then smiled back. “May I kiss you?”
“Always,” I said, and he wrapped his arms around me, bent me slightly backward, and kissed me.
Every time we kissed, it was like coming home. It was tempting to think that it had always been that way, and to be fair, I could remember some pretty scorching kisses from the years before his disappearance. The first time I’d come to his house to tell him how I felt, when I’d been absolutely sure I was going to be dead by the end of the week; the night he’d found me rinsing ghoul guts out of my hair in the downstairs bathroom and suggested we might do a better job of keeping our relationship from attracting the attention of the local gossips if we just went ahead and made it official; the night Kevin had been conceived. But there had been a lot of mundane, everyday kisses, too. More of those than the memorable ones, I was sure.
These days, though . . . absence makes the heart grow fonder, and fifty years had been enough time for my heart to go from “fond” to “absolutely obsessed.” Every kiss was the best kiss anyone had shared since the invention of kissing, and made me regret how few opportunities we had for time alone while shepherding a large group of pan-dimensional refugees to their new home. He made my knees go weak and my pulse rate spike, and it was reassuring that I could still do the same to him.
Thomas pulled back to study my face, eyes slightly glazed, like he was deliberating between painting my portrait and devouring me whole. I made a small, inquisitive noise and pressed my body against his, feeling the length of him like a promise of things we almost certainly wouldn’t be able to do tonight.
As if summoned by the thought, someone clapped their hands outside the tent.
“Hey, boss?” called Sally. “Something that looks a lot like a giant bat just tried to take off with one of the kids. Think you might want to get out here.”
Thomas sighed heavily, and leaned in to kiss me one more time, briefly, before he stepped back. “Duty calls,” he said. “I love you.”
Then he was gone, ducking out of the tent into the evening air. I stayed where I was for a long moment, panting and aching with the need for him to come back, shout “false alarm,” and throw me to the floor. He didn’t come back.
The mice cheered.
When I stepped out of the tent, the camp was virtually deserted. Fires still burned, lighting up the night in flickering orange, but the people were gone. I approached the nearest tent, sticking my head inside, and was met with the sight of four people—two adults, two children—huddled in the center. They all looked up as the fabric rustled, their eyes wide and alarmed, then slumped back down. One of the adults gestured for me to get out.
I got out.
There was no sign of Thomas or Sally. I still had my revolvers, and the knives inside my shirt, but nothing bigger than that; if this was a serious threat, I was a sitting duck. Hopefully, that meant we weren’t dealing with anything major.
Something flew by overhead, flapping wings creating a heavy sound, like canvas snapping in the wind. I glanced up, but it was already gone. Right. Sally had said it was a giant bat. I just hoped it hadn’t managed to carry anyone off before they all got under cover and out of the target environment. I kept walking, now turning to keep my eyes on the sky.
Bats are fast. They can strike almost before the eye can follow. They’re far from the fastest things in the multiverse, however, and after you’ve shot a striking snake before it could hit you, a bat just doesn’t seem all that frightening. Besides, it might not be sure I was a good prey animal yet, and if it made another exploratory pass, I was going to put some holes in its wings.
I was so busy focusing on the sky that the hands grabbing my arm from the side caught me by surprise as Sally dragged me into the tent where she’d taken cover. I squawked, cutting the sound off as soon as I realized what was happening, and turned to glare at her.
“Sorry,” she said, unrepentantly. “Boss is off making sure the kids’re all under cover. He’ll be pissed if I let you get carted off because you wanted to go big-game hunting with a peashooter.”
“My guns are not peashooters,” I objected.
“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.
The bat wheeled and flew off closer to the two. Fucker was still looking for a meal. I couldn’t blame it for that—instinct and all—but given the size of the explosive it had just swallowed, I didn’t want it getting too near the tents. “Dammit,” I muttered, rolling to my feet and waving my arms in the air as I hopped up and down. “Here! Over here! I’m defenseless and alone!”
The bat banked back around, clearly seeing me as the easier target. Good bat. Thomas stopped running, grabbing Sally’s arm and pulling her to a halt along with him as he realized I was actually up to something. Better husband.
I stopped waving and ran away from the tents, as fast as I could.
I made it about ten feet before I felt the wind from the bat’s approach on the back of my neck, and knew that if this grenade was a dud, I was about to have a big problem.
The grenade wasn’t a dud.
I had a different problem. Namely, I had a massive bat less than a foot behind me when the grenade it had swallowed went off and the whole damned thing exploded, splashing bat guts and gore absolutely everywhere. The blast flung me forward to the rock. I managed to catch myself with my hands before gravity helped me catch myself with my face, and I lay there, as flat as I could make myself, while bat pattered down all around me in a thick, horrible rain.
When it finished falling, I rolled onto my back, spitting out a bit of muscle that had somehow managed to wind up in my mouth, and started laughing.
I was still laughing when Thomas and Sally reached me, Sally looking alarmed, Thomas looking resigned. He leaned down to offer me his hands, and I took them, letting him pull me to my feet. My boots slipped in the gore. I tightened my grip on Thomas, holding on until I was sure I wasn’t going to just fall down if I let go. Once I had my footing back, I released him and wiped the bat out of my eyes.
“That was surprisingly fun,” I said. “Think there are going to be any more of those things?”
“Try not to sound so happy about that idea, maybe,” said Sally dryly.
“Ordinary bats live in colonies, although they generally hunt solo when not in a target rich environment,” said Thomas. “This is not a place where a bat would normally expect to find a solid meal. I think tonight’s guest was an opportunist more than anything else. We should set a watch, but chances are good that we won’t have any more visitors.”
“Great,” I said. “Do we have enough water on hand for me to have a bath?”
Sally rolled her eyes. “Woman explodes a bat all the hell over herself, and wants a bath.”
“Well, yes. There’s blood in my hair.” I smiled at her, aware of how distressing the expression would be with the gore covering my face. “It gets sticky.”
“It’s gross.”
“You could have exploded the bat, if you’re that interested in me staying clean.”
“I can’t even—” Sally threw her hands in the air, announced, “I’m going to go set watches,” and stalked off back toward the tents, leaving me and Thomas alone with the remains of blasted bat.
I bent to retrieve one of the larger chunks, holding it up to show him. “Want a roast?”
Thomas laughed, and everything was going to be okay.