Inn Between Worlds Read online

  Gideon's eyes could not focus on the perfectly black surface of the portal. “Surface” was a misnomer for something that, like the line it sprang from, had no third dimension, but it looked solid enough to stop bullets right up until the moment that Ruben stepped through and into infinite blackness.

  The Kelt and his gleaming armor disappeared and the black rectangle shrank back into a line which collapsed further into a point of light before winking out of existence altogether. In moments, all that was left to show Ruben Santiago ever existed were his footprints and the lingering hint of tobacco smoke on the air.

  Gideon, for the third time now, withdrew his portal controller. With his other hand, he checked his watch again.

  “Thirty seconds,” he said, using that time to double-check the portal coordinates. Moving from universe to universe was easy compared to where he would be going after leaving the planet.

  He craned his neck upward, using the moon that existed in this universe to gauge positions in the sky. It was too early for stars, but the planet’s sun was low on the opposite horizon. The steel gray sky was clear, another reason Gideon selected this spot in particular.

  Another few seconds passed and Gideon frowned. Either his calculations were off or the sky was still too bright and he would have to re-adjust his coordinates to do something drastic like watch the spectacle from the moon.

  Fortunately, he did not have to do that. As it turned out, he was simply forty-three seconds early. The streak appeared in the eastern sky, opposite the sun, and gradually elongated until it stretched across the sky like a chalk tally mark.

  The comet’s progress across the sky was slow, something that would likely take the better part of a day to pass overhead. After wrapping around the sun’s gravity and perturbed in its eons-old path by Pelleus IV and its new moon, the comet would return every three-hundred and eighty-one years. Now that it was not trying to kill every living thing around him, the sight was actually rather beautiful.

  He raised a hand in mock salute. “Gideon Wallace: One. Planetkilling Comet: Zero.”

  With that last remark, he tapped the activation button on his portal controller. Like Ruben’s portal, it sprang into existence a few paces away. Tracking a near infinite number of portals through time and space required more math than Gideon could hope to understand, but “zero” was easy enough. “Zero,” in a multiverse with no center, was the place through which each of the portals passed on the way to its destination. Trying to go there, however, was a feat not unlike exiting a moving train safely at a stop with no platform.

  Gideon’s portals appeared oval-shaped, which he considered to be more aesthetically pleasing than a simple rectangular door. If anyone or anything else was going to interrupt him, the opportunity would only exist for another few seconds.

  He took another deep breath, tasting the salt air from the sea, and bid Pelleus IV goodbye. Perhaps he would return in seventy or seventy-five centuries and see what the crew of the Staraveth did with the planet they asked him to save.

  As he stepped toward the perfect blackness that his mind demanded be some sort of mirror, Gideon amended another thought to that chain.

  “Zero” also meant home, the Inn Between Worlds.

  ***

  Gideon returned to the Inn with a very specific plan in mind. He would go to his suite, leaving some of his equipment and probably his hat and coat there, and then go down to eat. Plans afterward depended on who, if anyone, he came across in the process. First, however, he had to find his suite.

  The Inn mutated with every person who came through, and it did so differently for each of those potentially thousands of souls. For Gideon, the place between realities provided a suite that existed only when he was present. Its interior never changed unless he changed it and everything left inside remained as he left it.

  Friends told him the door remained even when he was absent, but it was locked and resisted every attempt to break in. Even tools which should have made short work of what appeared to be a simple wooden door failed to make a mark—unless, that is, Gideon was present, at which point his door was just like any other door in the Inn.

  The transitions this time were even more jarring than usual. Gideon stepped into an anteroom pulled directly from soft science fiction. Random control panels dotted the oddly rounded walls as soft light emanated from strips of cool blue where crown molding should have been. Strangely comfortable J-shaped chairs sat momentarily unoccupied.

  “This is new,” he muttered. “Wonder who brought this in?”

  From there, things transitioned to stone and then to wood as he wound his way through twisted corridors to his room. The paths might have been less twisted than some days, but the halls were nothing he could consider “straight” or even “easily navigated” today. He said his hellos to a few people as he passed, promising to return for dinner after dropping his things in his suite. None of them mentioned the woman from Ruben’s story.

  Today, his room was on the second floor of a wooden guild house. His door was unmistakable, second in a long line that stretched past the vanishing point and seemed to spiral around and upward—he saw no other staircase. It was certainly preferable to the half-mile hike through a limestone cavern that it had been before taking the job at Pelleus IV.

  Inside, he automatically doffed his outerwear, throwing the hat into the top shelf of his suite’s living room armoire. The belt and gun holster went on a peg on the outside. He hung his coat and waistcoat just below the hat and shut the door, starting the machine’s cleaning system. Like so much else in the Inn, his armoire looked ancient, but concealed an array of advanced technologies. It could be programmed to maintain any garment, or even simple tools, and Gideon stored most of his outerwear in its oak walls. For his tastes, it maintained the sort of slightly worn, lived-in look that he preferred, while still repairing any real damage.

  It was then that Gideon noticed a new door in the living room. It occupied a stretch of wall previously covered by a painting of the sun silhouetting the largest of Sunkiss’s floating mountains. His reading chair should have been a pace away, enough room to look up and appreciate the skyscape, but not so close that Gideon could knock into it if he moved the chair.

  The painting had been shifted to one side to accommodate the new door and his reading chair now sat several paces away from the door, on the side opposite the painting.

  Gideon frowned, withdrawing his LeMat from its holster, but leaving the belt hanging on the side of the armoire. Habitually, he checked the various mechanisms archaic and futuristic, then the new door. For the moment, it was locked and so left it where it was.

  Technically, the Inn was a place where violence “did not happen.” That technicality was enforced by the permanent inhabitants, himself included, and had nothing to do with the nature of the Inn itself. Gideon did not mind having neighbors, but the sudden appearance of a door in his formerly unchangeable suite set off a warning bell in his mind.

  Carrying the gun into the bathroom, he mentally compiled a list of things that needed to be done before dinner. Certain things were more important than finding out why there was a strange door in his suite and, despite two centuries to break the habits, he remained a product of nineteenth-century England.

  With his pistol within easy reach, Gideon disrobed the rest of the way. Shirt and pants went into a separate cleaning machine, one that was less sophisticated than the armoire holding his coat and hat. With hands steadied by two hundred years of experience, Gideon prepped the shaving soap and razor, completing the process in just a few minutes.

  Five more minutes resulted in a fresh shirt and pants, which Gideon laid out on his bed while rummaging around for the rest of the outfit. Even in the Inn, or perhaps especially here, presentation at dinner was important. Gideon pushed a line of hanging clothes aside, dissatisfied with all of them. Something motivated him to seek out something different, perhaps a brighter shade than his usual choices. He supposed it was Ruben’s message; if he
were to meet a potential new employer, Gideon supposed he should make an extra effort.

  A flash of color at the back of the closet caught his eye and Gideon withdrew a brilliant, sapphire blue cravat. It had been a gift from a friend nearly a hundred years ago now and complemented the dark orange of his topcoat nicely, but Gideon considered it too bright for normal wear. Still, it seemed to call to him and he added it to the pile of clothes on the bed.

  Last, to cover up the smells of work and salt from Pelleus IV, Gideon went back to the bathroom. In the cabinet above the sink waited various colognes and perfumes. Another few minutes worth of searching resulted in a bay rum based on a blend he created for himself two hundred years before, while working as a land broker in London. Splashing it on his neck resulted in a bloom of orange and rose. Under that lurked jasmine and juniper swirling in a deep base of dark vanilla.

  Satisfied with that step, Gideon returned to the bed. Across the room, a setting sun that did not exist caught his eye. He went to the window, looking out over a dockside that also never, to his knowledge, existed. The ships out there had glittering holographic sails unlike anything his Earth ever produced. Of course, nothing was outside the Inn, not even “nothing.” There simply was no “outside” at all, but the ocean view persisted nonetheless.

  Watching as a submarine surfaced and unfurled a beautiful, glowing magenta sail that slowly pulled it across the harbor “toward” his window, Gideon went through the next steps of dressing for dinner. The last of those steps was to pierce the center of his sapphire cravat with a stud whose pea-size pearl had been taken from a clam about which “monstrous” did not even begin to suffice as a descriptor.

  Like the harbor that was so similar to the view from his old office window, the bed where he laid out his clothes simultaneously reminded him of both of his old homes. In a different wood or another shade of stain, the features would have clashed with one another. The bed’s four tall posts reminded him of the London where he had been born—dark, stolid, but hiding little minute details deep in the grain where most would never look. By contrast, the openwork headboard and footboard might have been called “art noveau” if they came from Earth, but they came from Sunkiss, an airy world of open skies, flying cities, and wingsuits. A world of bright sun, it had been his home before coming to the Inn, while first searching for Sid Belmonte and then while fighting Corinthus.

  In the living room, his armoire complained with an indignant beeping noise when he opened the door early. The faint chemical odor from the inside dissipated in moments, and Gideon withdrew his coat first. Gideon bought it shortly before he accidentally left Earth the first time. Double breasted and cut with a tight waist like a frock, but with pockets and a belt, it was also one of the few items in Gideon’s possession when he touched that first portal. The gun and its belt came later, and in a place like the Inn they served as a fashion statement as much as anything.

  Gideon buttoned the coat, wrapped the gun belt around his waist, then spent a few moments adjusting bits of his outfit in the mirror until everything read with the proper air of casualness. The hat he transferred to a hatrack beside the suite's main door—the door that was supposed to be there. He was inside, after all, and wearing his hat indoors would not do.

  He debated leaving the new door alone and going about his business as usual. After all, nothing here was permanent and it was bound to happen to his room sooner or later. Still, the mysterious door was exactly that: a mystery. If there was one thing Gideon could not resist, as evidenced by following what he thought was a will o' the wisp a very many years ago now, that thing was a mystery.

  Going to the door, Gideon examined it in detail before even touching it. By appearance, it looked like any other wooden door. The surface was a little rough, perhaps, but the sort of roughness that came from years of things knocking into it rather than weather or deliberate damage. It had been revarnished at some point, and probably sanded and cleaned, but the character of the damage remained.

  The brass doorknob was likewise subtly damaged and old. The rim had been polished smooth by a thousand-million hands, but the face bore scratches and marks of time. One large thumb-print, much larger than anything a human would have left, had been etched into the back of the knob, seemingly impervious to the wear of age.

  He placed his hand on the doorknob, finding it on the cold side of things, but still a normal temperature. That, at least, was a good sign. Gideon had no desire to open a mysterious door and find it led to the center of a conflagration or the top of an ice mountain.

  Taking another moment to tug fretfully at his tie and mouthing the words, “first impressions, Gideon,” he wondered what might be waiting for him. Human was the most likely answer, but nonhuman species made up a full quarter of the Inn's population at any given time.

  He knocked. “Hello?”

  A moment passed before a female voice replied, “come in.”

  He hesitated a moment, a short one, before turning the knob and opening the brand-new, ancient door. The room on the other side was an artist's representation of what the London of his time might have looked like in a world where gears and mechanical iconography dominated. The usual things were present, but every last one of them had been styled to look far more complex than was necessary, the ultimate triumph of form over function.

  A woman walked in from the other room dressed in a similar artist's rendition of the fashions of his mortal youth. Her clothes took even more liberties with history, or at least the history of his world, than her room did. A brownish gold skirt flowed from her waist, but only in the back. The front of her right leg was shrouded by what would have been part of a lace crinoline in his world, and aside from stocking and garter, her right leg was bare nearly to the hip. A brocade corset, black velvet set against a very dark gray satin, topped that. It stopped just under her breasts, which were only partially covered by a silver blouse. Her shoulders and arms were covered by a bolero in a color just different enough from her skirt to be noticeable.

  Her face, the last thing Gideon noticed as his eyes traveled around the artistically-interpreted room, was gorgeous in its own right and sported intense, dark makeup more akin to the Earth of two centuries after his birth than to anything truly Victorian.

  If everything in front of him had been calculated to hold his attention, Gideon supposed this was the perfect way to do it. It all was just enough like what he grew accustomed to before falling through that first portal to project familiarity, but so very different in ways that grasped and held his attention.

  She smiled, positively lighting up the room. Gideon felt irresistibly drawn to her for a moment, despite knowing nothing about her. Whatever else happened, he realized this was a person he needed to get to know, not just on an intimate level but on a practical one.

  Gideon had spent nearly two centuries living in the Inn Between Worlds and in that time had developed a sense for when people were more than they appeared. Corinthus had given him that feeling, at least he had before Gideon, Reuben, Sid, and Helena trapped him in a special anomaly that—theoretically—erased his existence. Later, Umbras gave him the same impression, but that scar-faced man left before Gideon could do more than offer to buy him a drink.

  Now, this woman gave off that same intangible aura of power. In reality, she could have been a talking rock and Gideon would have placed her firmly and instantly in his “get to know” list.

  “Good evening,” she said, striding across the room as though she owned it. She stopped a pace away from Gideon, just a little closer than he expected, and extended a hand. Gideon took it, finding her skin soft and warm, exactly as expected, but concealing a titanic strength that nothing about her silhouette indicated. “Catherine.”

  “Gideon Wallace,” he replied automatically.

  She nodded, still smiling, and stepped away. “I apologize for disrupting your room with,” she waved in the direction of the doorway through which Gideon came, “that.”

  He shrugged. “It'
s nothing.”

  Catherine arched an eyebrow. “Really? I'm given to understand you're very particular about your neighbors.”

  “You've talked to the other guests, I see.”

  “Of course.”

  He cracked a grin. “The shastikan and I came to an understanding.”

  Again, she echoed his expression, grinning in response. Her face almost turned conspiratorial for a moment. “Actually, the story that came up the most was the weekend you shared a balcony with Sebastianus.”

  Gideon laughed. “Having to duel my way past him whenever we met, well, it got old. In my defense, there was a pool there the night before, and,” Gideon emphasized the conjunction, “tossing him off the balcony meant he came to find me a few weeks later when he needed a hand on a mission. Wins all around.”

  “Stories abound, Gideon. You’ve been here for a while.”

  “Long enough,” he admitted. “And you?”

  “I come and go,” she replied as a mysterious expression flickered across her face.

  He took a half step backward to better size her up again. Now that he had a second look, Gideon chastised himself for not picking up on the obvious clues. She was not connected to power as he first thought. Rather, like Corinthus, she herself radiated power. Not only that, but she moved with a grace and ease which told him she knew how to use it.

  He also picked up on the distinct feeling that she was not just watching him but silently examining him. Well, he thought with an inward groan as the cliché passed through his mind, two people could play at that game. Human or not—and if she was the same as Corinthus, whatever he was, then the odds leaned heavily toward “not”—some bits of body language were nearly universal. Even the giant living starship Pavarotti had body language that could be read from the right distance.