Katabasis — Chapter no 15

Chapter Fifteen

Hold tight!” The boatman jammed his staff against the riverbank, and the boat pitched accordingly. Alice stumbled into Peter, who stumbled against the railing. “The breaks are dangerous here. Let me get us out of the shallows . . .”

The little ship bobbed perilously against the Lethe, but the boatman seemed skilled at keeping them afloat. Alice saw a variety of navigating instruments about the deck—several punting poles of varying lengths, two oars, a steering wheel, and even a battery-powered motor that looked suspiciously modern. The ship seemed a patchwork combination of punting canoe, rowboat, and sailboat all at once. The boatman dashed about arranging the sails, then did something complicated-looking with the rudder, until the ship was chugging at a merry pace parallel to the shore.

Then he set down his staff and stepped forth to appraise his guests.

“Hullo!” He pulled the mask off his face, revealing large brown eyes on a thin, friendly face. He was a she. “Welcome aboard the Neurath. I’m Elspeth.”

Alice knew this face. She knew this name.

She wasn’t supposed to know it. All mentions of Elspeth were scrubbed from the department records. A framed photograph of every year’s cohort hung along the department walls, excepting the class of 1975. All the faculty liked to pretend Elspeth had never existed. But rumors survived, passed down from cohort to cohort, and when it came Alice’s turn to receive the secret she could not help going to the university library, like so many others had before her, and digging up the microfilm to find the same Cambridge Daily article with a smudged photograph of that face, stubborn and lovely in profile, dark eyes glaring over sullen cheeks.

Elspeth Bayes. Bachelor’s from Radcliffe, master’s from Berkeley; Jacob Grimes advisee, specializing in maths and logic. All this Alice recalled from the first paragraph of the Cambridge Daily headline. She had died ten years before Alice arrived.

Alice knew well the story. She knew every gruesome detail, etched deeper into popular memory with every retelling, details so chillingly precise that you knew they had to be the truth. They said that one winter’s morning the Lady Margaret women’s VIII went for a pre-Bumps training session up the Cam. They said when the rowers returned to the boathouse, the cox saw something dark floating in the river—a trash bag? A clump of leaves?—just in time to order, “Hold up”—for the rowers to jam their oars perpendicular against the water and park the boat. Bump bump bump bump.

Four bow-side oars thwacked the dark thing in succession as the boat drifted past and glided parallel to the shore. They said only the cox realized what had happened at first, since only she sat facing forward; that all the other rowers had left the boat and were straggling up to the boathouse before the cox stumbled out on wobbly legs and fainted dead on the shore.

Emergency services were called, statements were given, and since the unlucky cox had taken an undergraduate survey course in applications of magick the previous term, the blue and bloated body was quickly identified as that of Elspeth Bayes. The punch line of this terrible story, the line no one failed to repeat in a hushed voice over chips and beer: “And the coach said—well, if they weren’t dead before that bludgeoning, they surely are now.”

An autopsy found no evidence of foul play. She hadn’t been strangled, beaten, or stabbed. She was fully dressed, clothes wet and tight against her skin. No evidence of sexual abuse. All anyone could conclude was that Elspeth had drowned in the river Cam of her own accord, and a note found later in her room, in her own handwriting, confirmed the police conclusion: Tired—I am so tired—and I can only go now into the dark. Tell them I am

sorry. Tell him— But that was all they printed.

Professor Grimes never spoke of Elspeth. Alice had met several of his other former students at conferences—invariably tall, deep-voiced young men who laughed comfortably with other faculty the way that only young tenure-track faculty can. They boasted of their time surviving Grimes, and Grimes boasted of their accomplishments in turn. To graduate from under Grimes put you in a rare and exclusive club, self-satisfied veterans with golden futures, to whom the name Elspeth meant nothing.

But Alice had found the records. There was a time—about six months ago—when she became obsessed, and spent a week going through

microfilm of city newspapers in the university library, stopping every time she came across mention of body and Cambridge and suicide. She had to know if Elspeth’s story was real, and if so, what weakness it was that sent her into the river. Was she predisposed to suicide—or had something happened in the lab? How flimsy, really, was the line between each and survival? The students had their own theories, and every retelling ascribed a different motive. Failed her viva voce. Rejected for publication. Turned down for the Durham job. But the news coverage was so scant and offered such vague platitudes. Tragic story. Fragile girl. Graduate school isn’t for everyone.

“Ahhhh!” Archimedes made a happy yowling noise and darted forward, skirting between Elspeth’s legs like they were slalom poles. She laughed in delight and knelt to scratch his head. “Hello, you!”

Archimedes purred. Elspeth beamed up at them. Alice was startled to discover that she was beautiful. The newspaper photograph made her out to be severe and mousy, but in person, she moved with a blinking, birdlike charm. Elspeth was precisely Professor Grimes’s type—slender, underfed, dark hair pulled into a ballerina’s bun—and this identification put a sharp twist in Alice’s gut.

“You’re magicians, then?” Elspeth appraised them. “You’ve got to be.

Chalk stains all over.”

“Peter Murdoch,” said Peter. “And that’s—” He did not look at her.

“Alice Law.”

“Peter and Alice. My pleasure.” Elspeth grasped their hands in succession and shook vigorously. Her palm was warm and clammy, and Alice jumped to feel her solidity. George Edward Moore would have envied

that texture.

“You know Archimedes?” Alice asked.

“Who doesn’t? Here, sweetie.” Elspeth held out her arms. Archimedes jumped up and snuggled against her chest. “So. Ramanujan, was it? Yes.

Clever. You’re the first pair I’ve seen who’ve actually managed it, you know. Everyone always gets stuck on Setiya’s Modifications, they don’t have the maths for it.” The words rushed out Elspeth’s mouth without pause or punctuation; she seemed unaware she was speaking in full paragraphs.

Perhaps a decade of loneliness did that to you. Perhaps they were the only souls Elspeth had spoken to since her death. Her gaze darted eagerly between them, drinking in their faces. “Journeying to Hell was all the craze

during my days. Everyone kept threatening to do it, but no one ever managed it, and the first few years I sat at that bridge watching and waiting for someone to make it over. Five years in I figured they’d just stopped trying. So how much did it cost you?”

She paused so abruptly Alice did not realize they’d been asked a question.

After a beat, Peter said, “Half our natural lifespans.”

“You must have really wanted it.”

“We’re here to—” Peter began.

But Elspeth chattered on. “I wonder about the mechanics. Do you think you’ll age prematurely? Do you think death has set in now, like a cancer?

Or that some terrible accident will befall you when you’re fifty? Do you think the ground will just crack open beneath you and the underworld will swallow you up?” All this she uttered without any semblance of tact. Alice could understand this—after a decade in Hell, probably tact didn’t seem so important.

“Er—I really don’t know,” said Peter. “Hopefully not the latter.”

“I suppose it’s a bit scary, though,” said Elspeth. “Hitting forty and wondering if you’ll keel over from a heart attack the next day—”

“What were those things?” Alice cut her off. She felt if Elspeth was going to chatter on like this, she might steer the conversation into productive territory. “You’ve met them before, clearly—”

“Oh, I call them little rovers.” Elspeth made a face. “Apparatuses of bone. Set in motion with power beyond me—but they’re scared of the Lethe, as you’ve noticed. That helps. I’ve been collecting spray bottles for ages.” She waved her staff. “This one’s a perfume bottle. Dior. Smell.”

They sniffed as commanded.

“Very nice,” said Peter.

“But who’s controlling them?” asked Alice. “Is it a deity?”

“Oh, worse. A magician.” Elspeth lowered the staff. “Have either of you ever heard of the Kripkes?”

“No,” said Peter, as Alice said, “Oh, Jesus.”

THE KRIPKES HAD NOT BEEN FACULTY at Cambridge. Not in their wildest dreams—they were anathema to English academia. Rather the Kripkes were visual artists and illusionists at Berkeley, where that sort of wild and

unconventional magick was encouraged. Magnolia Kripke worked with oils and watercolors. Nicomachus Kripke did sleight-of-hand magick tricks.

They were the rare academics who could fill both a Vegas auditorium and a lecture hall at Harvard. They could, with only black and white paint, create mazes inside a closet that made entrants feel as if they were walking around an entire courtyard. They could, with nothing but mirrors and light, convince their audience that they’d traveled back decades through time.

Their commercial appeal led many in the academic establishment to discount their scholarship. It was, after all, a golden rule in academia that the more popular one was among the masses, the less valuable one’s research had to be. Alice did not agree—in fact she had been something of a Magnolia Kripke fangirl during her undergraduate years, as were many young magicians of her age, and she felt that beneath the Kripkes’ pomp and spectacle lay truly breathtaking theoretical advancements. But to most of their colleagues, the Kripkes were all smoke and mirrors; showmen only, not serious thinkers. The administration at Berkeley seemed to agree. The same year that the Kripkes sold out a headliner tour across North America, their tenure applications were denied. Insufficient contributions to the field.

If only they’d spent less time partying in tour vans and more time publishing.

Possibly this slight led the Kripkes to disappear from the public view for five years—it was rumored they took on private funding from millionaire dilettantes after they lost university affiliation—and then reappear for one dramatic exhibit at Royal Albert Hall. Their latest trick, the Kripkes announced, was to return from Hell.

They distributed invitations all over the country in the weeks before this performance—cryptic, all-black papers with the words “TO HELL AND BACK,” with the subtitle, “Professors Nicomachus and Magnolia Kripke.”

Only a smattering of academics showed up. The way Alice heard it, most people were put off by this ploy for attention. The Kripkes had invited three board members of the Royal Academy of magick, which was the number needed in attendance to verify the efficacy of any new magical technique, but those invitations were declined. Probably the Kripkes would put on some great, Gothic spectacle; lights, hellfire, maybe “summon” a demon or two. A pretty show, but not real magick.

So no one expected it when, in front of a thousand people, Nicomachus and Magnolia Kripke carefully slit one another’s carotid arteries, lay down,

and bled to death on stage.

Immediately the academic community distanced themselves from what had happened in London. That wasn’t magick, that was all vulgar theatrics.

The International Conference of Magick had a big role in that. They couldn’t have the Kripkes’ reputation bring down the rest of the field. They had come so far from the days they were maligned as a pseudoscience, as witchcraft, and all the pagan, Satanic spectacle of the Kripkes’ work was very damaging to the field’s legitimacy.

Consensus was that the Kripkes had gone mad. The narrative was so convenient. Magick, especially of this variety, made one lose their grip on reality. The first rule every graduate student learned was that at the base of every paradox there existed the truth. That you should never fully believe your own lie, for then you lost power over the pentagram. That magick was an act of tricking the world but not yourself. You had to hold two opposing beliefs in your head at once. You had to know your way back.

But Nicomachus and Magnolia had been living within increasingly complex webs of fantasy. It was inevitable—they had finally lost their grip on reality, had actually fooled themselves into thinking they had power over life and death. They were not magicians anymore. They were mere charlatans now, lost in their own illusions.

So when the Kripkes died, the academic community greeted their disappearance with little ceremony. No one issued a retrospective of their work; no one edited a Festschrift; no one named any endowed chairs after them. The Kripkes’ two graduate students dropped out of their respective programs. One found work as a visual effects designer in Hollywood, and the other was living in a commune outside Palo Alto the last anyone heard.

Alice knew of the Kripkes, for she had fanatically researched everyone and everything tangentially related to underworld sojourns. She’d found a torn and bloodstained copy of their Royal Albert Hall pamphlet, crumpled carelessly at the bottom of a records box. She’d found what few research notes by Nicomachus and Magnolia were accessible to the public—the rest were lost when the Kripke family home was sold off. But small wonder Peter didn’t recognize their names. After all, there wasn’t much point studying someone who went to Hell and failed to come back.

“THEY’VE BEEN ROVING THE EIGHT COURTS ever since.” Elspeth was doing something complicated with the ropes and sail. They were quite far from shore now, and the Neurath glided smoothly over deeper, calmer waters. “In the beginning, they still looked human. When they still cared about what they used to be. They’ve adapted since, taken on more and more of . . . the attributes of deities, we might say. I started seeing those little rovers a few years ago.” She made a face. “Nasty little things. They’ve produced a veritable army since.”

“What are they?” asked Peter. “I mean, what kind of magick—”

“I wish I knew. I’ve got two theories about it. The first is that they’ve found Shades and bound them to living matter—which is terrifying, because if they can do that then they’re well on their way to doing anything.

That’s why I think it’s unlikely.”

“And what’s your other theory?”

“That they’ve split off parts of themselves into the bones. That the constructs are satellites of their own minds.”

Peter blanched. “But that—I mean, that’s incredibly sophisticated magick.”

“Well, the Kripkes have had a lot of time. They always were underestimated as proper magicians, I think. The stuff they’ve come up with down here would revolutionize the field above, if only they ever got out to publish.”

“What about that large construct?” Alice asked. “The one on two legs.”

“They’ve still got that thing with them?”

“It moves differently than the others,” said Alice. “It’s . . . more deliberate, like it has a will of its own. Have they been innovating?”

“No.” Elspeth’s face tightened. “No, that’s their son.”

Alice and Peter spoke at once. “What?”

“Theophrastus,” said Elspeth. “Cute kid. I saw him at a conference hotel once. He was playing with these plastic dinosaurs. Kept banging them together and shouting they needed to reproduce to save their species.”

Alice’s chest felt tight. “They didn’t . . .”

“They decided they didn’t want to leave him behind,” said Elspeth. “So they brought him along. Gave him some juice laced with arsenic before the show, and collected his dead little soul shortly after they journeyed down themselves.”

“That’s horrible,” said Peter. “They—I can’t believe they murdered—”

“Not murdered. Not from their perspective,” said Elspeth. “You have to understand: they think they’re still finding a way out of this mess. So the way they see it, all they did was bring him along for the trip. No different from joining Mum and Dad for a weekend conference in Birmingham.”

“So they’re still trying to see things through?” Peter asked.

“The Great Quest.” Elspeth nodded. “They’ve been stuck on it for years. They’ve traveled all over the eight courts by now. Found some parts that even I haven’t explored, I’m sure. And they’ve been amassing their— research assistants, let’s call them. Used to be just one or two rovers I’d see loping around. Now there’s dozens patrolling every court. Until now, I’ve never seen so many assembled in one place. They must be really excited about you.”

“What are they looking for?” asked Alice.

“Anything that could be of use,” said Elspeth. “All sorts of things find their ways down to Hell, you see. Not always on purpose. Usually it’s objects. Childhood toys. Old furniture. Things buried in coffins or discarded at places of death. Bones, lots of bones.” Elspeth gestured at herself and Alice noticed, upon closer examination, that her armor was not of fine steel, but an intricate sheet of bones and metal rubbish stitched together. At her waist dangled what Alice hoped was a rabbit skull. Around her neck hung a metal chain that might have once been used to flush a toilet. She looked like she’d dressed for a rock concert wearing only found items from the sewer.

“Sometimes it’s animals. Rats, mostly. Your occasional dog. They don’t mess with cats—nobody messes with cats.” Elspeth scratched Archimedes behind the ears. “No, we don’t—you good boy. Sometimes people come before their time. That doesn’t happen often. They have to be very lost, or very close to death. It’s dreadful to watch happen. They don’t ever find their way back up. They pass, and then their soul . . .” Elspeth fidgeted with her chain. “I saw a child once. Such a skinny thing. Unloved. Didn’t care where he was, to be honest. No one ends up in Hell if they have anywhere else to go. I tried to send him back up. The Kripkes got to him first.”

“And what did they do?” asked Peter.

Elspeth blinked hard at him. “What do you think?”

Alice stared back out over the shore, the deceptively empty sands. How lucky they’d been. How foolish.

“They are not human anymore,” said Elspeth. “They have no sense of compassion or justice. There is no reasoning with them. They have lost all

perspective on life and death. There is only knowledge, resources, and the Great Quest.”

“Jeez.” Peter hugged his chest. “We might as well just reincarnate, then.

Get it over with.”

“Oh, love.” Elspeth shook her head. “Didn’t anyone tell you?”

“Tell us what?”

“You don’t reincarnate if you die in Hell. Hell already operates on another metaphysical plane. We’re all soul stuff here. When you die in Hell, it’s not just your mortal body that disintegrates—it’s your soul stuff, too.”

She smacked her chest. “All this, it dissipates. If you die down here, that’s it for you. Total annihilation of the self.”

“But nobody said,” said Alice.

“Because nobody knows. All the sojourners’ accounts are by people who made it back, aren’t they? Survivorship bias, and all that. But I’ve seen it. The death of the soul. I’ve seen the Kripkes murder a soul, in fact. They do it to Shades, too. They’ve figured out how. It’s a horrible process. The screams alone. It’s always a small explosion, when a soul destructs.”

Peter was silent.

Alice, still gazing over the dunes, thought to the creatures in the Weaver Girl’s web. Those contorted figures. She hadn’t let any of her lovers move on, either. Just kept stringing them along, wringing them for shreds of entertainment, until. Until.

“Anyway,” Elspeth said brightly. “Who’s hungry?”

They stared blankly at her.

“Starving, aren’t you?” Elspeth was pushing their boat toward the shore.

Alice had not paid attention to the direction of their sailing; she knew only that they had skirted round the perilous cliffs and were back on flat, monotonous banks. “You’ve got to be. I assume you’re living on Lembas Bread; nothing else keeps. But that’s no way to get your nutrients.”

“True,” said Alice. “But what—”

“Splendid! Let’s have dinner.”

“I thought you didn’t need to eat,” said Peter.

“Course not.” Elspeth scratched the back of Archimedes’s head. “But I do need to feed this one. How do you feel about rats?”

Neither Peter nor Alice knew how to respond to this.

Elspeth laughed. “The traps are just across the bank. I won’t be five.

Don’t unmoor the boat and don’t wander off.” She slung her perfume-

spritzer staff over her back, then clambered up onto the railing. “More spray bottles under the deck if you need them. Stay dry!”

In one graceful movement she sprang off the side of the boat and landed clean on the shore. She turned, tossed them a wave, and then vanished at a sprint over the dunes.

FOR A MOMENT ALICE AND PETER stood side by side, watching the empty shore. The silence was excruciating.

“Well.” She glanced over at him. “Gosh. What a day.”

He said nothing.

He was furious; that was clear.

Alice had never known Peter’s anger before. For most of their career she hadn’t known it was possible for Peter Murdoch to get angry. Always he wore that affable smile in lab; when undergraduates made a mess of his pentagrams, he only cheered them up and then slowly, patiently instructed them on how to do things right. Everyone else in the department kept grudges, snapped occasionally when they were running low on sleep. There were always apologies going on at their department—I’m sorry I said you were a ninny, I didn’t mean it, I don’t think you’re a ninny. But never Peter.

So she did not know what to do with his stonewalling. She wished he would shout, rage, curse at her, or beat his fists. Anything was better than this stony sulk.

“Can we talk?” Her voice came out very small. “Murdoch?”

He would not turn to look at her. “Can’t stop you, can I?”

“I’m sorry for back there.”

“Oh, you are?”

A lump formed in her throat. “I didn’t mean to—I just looked down, and —”

“And the apple jumped into your hand?” Peter snorted. “We had a plan,

Law. It was so easy.”

“I know, I just—”

“Just condemned me? For fun?”

“I didn’t want—I didn’t know . . .”

Peter watched her, arms crossed and waiting, eyebrow arched as if to say, Go on.

But what explanation could she give? That was her hand. That was the green apple. “Sometimes . . .” She could barely speak. She did not know how to describe what had happened. She had never articulated this to anyone; she had tried for so long to pretend it was not a problem, because admitting the problem would make it real, and this could not be. My mind is broken and I cannot fix it, I cannot sort reality from dreams—that was not true. She could not live if it were true. “Sometimes, I try to think, and everything blares at once, and I don’t know where I am, or what I’m doing —”

“What are you trying to tell me, Law?” He scoffed. “Your tattoo makes

you stupid?”

She flinched.

“That you can’t follow simple instructions? Or that you just wanted me

dead?”

“That’s not what I—”

“But just think about what you’re saying,” Peter snapped. “You took the green. You would have left me trapped. And even if you changed your mind, you still considered that option. You wanted me to die.”

“I didn’t—”

“Factually you did!”

“I didn’t want that,” she cried. “I didn’t know, I couldn’t determine—I just, I was afraid you’d do the same.”

He flung up his hands. “Why on earth would you think that?”

“Your notebook,” she said helplessly. “I saw in your notebook, the spell for exchange—”

“Exchange?” His eyes went wide. “You thought I’d exchange you?”

“What else would that mean, Murdoch? How on earth would I interpret that?”

Peter shook his head. Alice could not make any sense of it. She would have preferred he looked guilty, because then at least her narrative would make sense, and then all their cards would be on the table. Then at least they would be definite enemies, and she would have cause to hate him. But if anything he seemed angrier than before. “You think I’m that sort of person? That I’m capable of—of trading your soul, like you’re nothing?”

“I don’t know.” She could hardly hear her own voice. “I guess I don’t know what I think of you. I don’t know what you could do.”

She knew as it left her mouth that it was the worst thing she could have said.

“Jesus Christ, Law.” He still would not look at her. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Then tell me, she wanted to cry. If only supplication could shatter his shell; if only she could beg long and hard enough for him to be honest with her. But the gulf between them seemed so vast now, and all the words that came to mind utterly insufficient. Still she had to try, and she had just opened her mouth, was casting for the right things to say, when Peter spoke.

“You know, I thought—” He swallowed. “I don’t know. For whatever reason, I still thought you weren’t like him.”

She felt worse than if he’d socked her in the face.

Something thumped over the side of the boat. “Dinner!” Elspeth clambered up, then bent to hold up her spoils. “You’re in luck. They’re fresh!”

Alice blinked down. Three fat rats lay strung together by twine.

“Get a fire going in that stove.” Elspeth directed Peter with one hand; with the other, she drew out a butcher’s knife. “Matches under the lid.”

Wordlessly Peter went to obey. Alice remained where she was, arms hugged tight against her ribs. She felt a terrible whooshing between her ears. She was afraid to move; she was certain if she unfolded her arms, then she might shatter.

Elspeth was oblivious to their distress; she chattered happily along as she took a knife to the rats. “Rats are most of what you get down here. Rats and moles. They keep burrowing further underground to see where they can get. Stands to reason they end up in Hell. Spiders too, but you can’t eat those.” She jammed her thumbs into flesh and yanked at the skins, which came off with a terrible ripping noise. “Keep the bones for me. They’re so tiny, and come in all sorts of shapes . . . I usually toss the meat out. They’re fleshier than they look, anyways; they’ll fill you right up.”

In short order Elspeth had the rats roasting over the fire on a spit. While they blackened and crackled she made a great fuss over laying out plates and silverware on a rickety folding table that she hauled out from beneath the oars. “Found these beauties a few years ago off the shore of Desire.

Usually plates come cracked and in pieces but these—these came whole, aren’t they lovely!” She paused; took in their anxious faces. “Oh, go on. It’s not Hell’s foodstuff, it’s safe.”

Alice was reminded of humble dinner parties in graduate apartments. It made no sense to cook at home instead of eating in hall, where the food was perhaps not better but certainly more plentiful. But still they loved hosting one another. It was pathetically charming, the way they showed off their charity shop acquisitions, the way Belinda insisted they all fuss over her slightly chipped porcelain milk pitcher with a kitten print when they assembled in her flat for tea. None of them could afford a matching dinnerware set or a proper table or even linens, but still they were proud to pass around the cheap bottles of port they’d found at Sainsbury’s because it was a luxury to have port at all. Once in her first year Alice had discovered an actual silver gravy bowl at Oxfam, and they all sat on her floor and ate mushroom gravy in April. It was nice to have company over and play homemaker, and pretend you were a real adult.

She therefore accepted a smoking rat leg, if only to be polite. But then her stomach took over and she dispensed with the silverware entirely, ramming the corpse against her mouth so her teeth could get in between the bones.

“There you are.” Elspeth helped more onto Alice’s plate. “Don’t forget to hydrate. Isn’t that better?”

Alice was doing much better. A fog was clearing from her head. It was the first home-cooked meal she’d had in ages—at the department, it was all Lembas Bread and cold tea—and she ate with such enthusiasm that soon all that was left was a neat pile of bones sucked clean.

She set her plate down. A wet burp escaped her mouth. “Sorry.”

“Excuse yourself.” Elspeth looked very pleased. “I’m glad you liked it.”

“So, Elspeth.” Peter set his fork down. He had not looked once at Alice since Elspeth’s return; now he spoke as if she were not there. “I’ve been wondering. How are you and the Kripkes using magick?”

“How do you mean?”

“We thought—perhaps it doesn’t work down here. The sand eats it up.”

“Oh.” Elspeth laughed. “You haven’t figured that out?”

She drew out a knife from her belt. Alice and Peter both instinctively shrank back, but Elspeth held the point to her own wrist and pressed. What bubbled out was not blood, precisely, but a thick, black-blue sludge.

Elspeth extended her other hand. “Chalk?”

Peter fished about in his pocket and handed her a stick.

“Anything you need patched up?”

“Cuts and bruises,” said Peter.

“Of course. Will Curry’s Paradox do?”

“Probably, yeah.”

They both watched in awed silence as Elspeth dipped the chalk in her not-blood like it was an inkwell and drew a perfect circle on the deck around her ankles. The pentagram was not a pristine white but a phosphorescent green that cast a pallid light around her ankles. But it did not sink away.

Curry’s Paradox. Commonly taught in Introduction to Analytic Magick classes, this was a silly play on conditional statements and self-reference that could, just for an instant, make true any arbitrary claim. Consider: If this statement is true, then pigs can fly. Call this statement S. Statement S has the structure “If S, then P.” If you write it out as a logic proof, you will discover you do end up proving S true, for you do end up writing “If S, then P.” So the statement S is true, and pigs can fly. The statement is S true, and

Peter has no wound.

“There you go,” said Elspeth.

Peter withdrew his arm, running fingers over soothed skin. “Thanks.”

“I figured that out long ago,” said Elspeth. “It’s the only thing that makes the chalk take effect—some kind of life force. It congeals with the living-dead force of the chalk. Adds some sort of . . . insulation, I suppose, against the silt. Though it doesn’t work so well with my blood. Whatever this is”—she patted her pale, not-bleeding arm—“seems a pale approximation of the real thing. It’s vital force that’s the key, it seems. Not much force one can draw from a Shade. But your blood . . . it’s warm, it’s bursting.”

She blinked at the knife, then blinked at Peter and Alice with an uncomfortably hungry look. Alice slid her sleeve over her wrist.

“Just a little dip, then?” Peter asked. “That’s all you need?”

“The more, the better. The effect seems proportional to—well, the sacrifice.” Elspeth blinked again, then set the knife down. “Curry is easy.

Doesn’t take much.”

“How much would a harder spell take?”

“Depends on your blood,” said Elspeth. “With Shade’s blood, quite a

lot. Living blood, I don’t know.”

“Should we try it?”

“Do Banach-Tarski.” Alice spoke up. “Do Banach-Tarski on your flask.”

The Banach-Tarski Paradox proved you could cut apart a ball into a finite number of subsets of points and reassemble them into two balls equal in volume to the first. Alice could not perform it herself; she understood only that it involved heavy maths, and had something to do with set theory and little infinities. But she knew Peter knew it, and that was good enough.

The thought had been lurking at the back of her mind. She needed a working flask. Hers was soiled. Peter’s was fine. Alone she would quickly die of thirst, but with a copied flask she would be all right, independent— free to go her own way.

If Peter had considered the same implications, he did not show it. He reached for his rucksack and pulled out his flask.

“Now the blood,” said Elspeth. “Knuckles are best, you won’t hit a

tendon.”

Peter hesitated.

Alice drew her knife. “Here.” She dug the sharp end into the knuckle of her thumb, harder and harder, until blood beaded around the metal. “Is that

enough?”

“Might be,” said Elspeth.

Alice held her hand out to Peter. He paused just a moment, then pressed his chalk against her thumb. The chalk soaked it up like a sponge; in seconds the entire stick was red.

Quickly Peter drew a circle around the flask, inscribed the paradox, and chanted it out loud. The Perpetual Flask shimmered. Peter reached in and drew it out. When he lifted it from the center its double remained, still in place. Alice, watching, could not help a little sigh. For no matter how many spells she had seen, no matter how long she’d studied magic, the act itself still astonished her. That you could fool the conservation of mass. That a

thing could be one, and then two.

“Try it,” said Peter.

He was right to check. Banach-Tarski copies didn’t always work. For one thing they always seemed flimsier. If it was food, it never tasted as good; if wine, it lacked depth—as if it knew it owed its existence to a mathematical loophole. They had a bad habit of randomly vanishing on you —two decided to reunite as one—but Alice couldn’t do anything about that.

She untwisted the flask and tipped some water in. She drank. It tasted clean, fresh. “It worked.”

“Good.” Peter would not look at her. “Keep it.”

“Thank you.” Alice slid the doubled flask into her own rucksack. Her thumb was still bleeding. She twisted it into a corner of her shirt and held it tight.

“So the Kripkes.” Peter turned to Elspeth. “Whose blood . . .”

“Come on,” said Elspeth. “Why do you think they’ve got all those patrols?”

Peter blinked, speechless. Alice shuddered. Elspeth appraised them with grim satisfaction. “Think hard,” she said. “In all your research in Tartarology, have you found a shred of documentation from the last decade?

Tell me. I’m really curious.”

Peter tilted his head. “Huh.”

“None.” Alice was certain about this. “Not even gossip.”

“And why do you think that is?”

“Don’t tell me the Kripkes got to them all,” said Peter.

“The Kripkes ensure there are no survivors.” Elspeth nodded. “Any magician comes down here, the Kripkes hunt them. No one’s going to make their way back from Hell before the Kripkes do, you see. No one’s going to beat them to the scoop. They steal their chalk, steal their notes and textbooks. Sometimes they interrogate their prey for the latest in research developments—I’ve seen poor souls stretched out over the racks for days and days. And always, always, it ends with draining their blood. They fill up their bladder sacks, they drench their chalk sticks, and off they go.”

“That’s sick,” said Peter.

“That’s research,” said Elspeth. “Nothing matters to anyone in Hell, I told you. Dogs, squirrels, the stray lost child . . .” Her throat pulsed.

“They’re all just fuel for them. Materials for the Great Quest.”

“You keep saying the Great Quest,” said Alice. “What’s that mean?”

“They’re not calling it the Great Quest anymore? Why are you here, then?”

Alice glanced quickly to Peter. It seemed obvious the last thing they should tell Elspeth was who they were here for. “I suppose we . . .”

“Might be an outdated term by now.” Elspeth rubbed her chin. “That’s what we were all calling it my year, anyways. To Hell and back was the goal. That was all the rage. It started with the Kripkes, and then everyone

wanted to do it. Nothing like a spectacular failure to inspire a thousand followers. Houdini only ever freed himself from death’s jaws; he never came back from the other side.”

“But you weren’t going on the quest,” said Peter. “You—I mean, I thought—”

“Right, just a normal suicide,” Elspeth said sharply. “But then I discovered pretty quick I don’t want to stay here, do I?”

Peter bobbed his head. “No, that’s very reasonable.”

“So now I’m on the Great Quest, same as the Kripkes. And we’re all

looking for the same thing to get out.”

“And what’s that?” asked Peter.

“Why, the True Contradiction,” said Elspeth. “The Dialetheia.”

Alice nearly dropped her plate with excitement. The power of a true contradiction—Contradiction Explosion—was the first thing anyone learned in logic class. Ex contradictione quodlibet—from a contradiction, anything follows. If you had a True Contradiction, then you could prove anything. Indeed, it exploded your boundaries of proof. She had been taught the silly, informal version: if you could accept the simple contradiction that one and two were the same, you could prove you were the Pope. You and the Pope are two. Therefore you and the Pope are one. More rigorously, once you had a logical contradiction in hand, you could inject any statement into a proof using disjunction. You could prove the sky was green. That rocks were bread, and water wine.

For a long time Alice had pursued the Contradiction Explosion as a way to get Professor Grimes out of Hell. But the trail kept running cold, and eventually she’d given up. The only basis anyone had for believing there existed a True Contradiction was the unlikelihood of Persephone’s persimmon seeds, but those seeds might never have existed at all.

“I thought the Dialetheia was a myth.” Peter echoed her thoughts.

“There’s just no literature—I mean, it’s all just conjectures—”

“Only because no one in the modern era’s found one.” Elspeth huffed.

“But we’re overdue for a discovery, and mark my words, it’s going to be me.”

“Wait.” Alice leaned forward. “You know where to find one?”

“I have some leads,” said Elspeth. “I’ve been at this for a decade. One

does make some modest progress.”

Peter asked, “So where is it?”

But Elspeth’s face closed up. She looked between the two of them, fingers tapping against the floor. “Well,” she said after a pause. “Don’t

suppose I’m about to just tell you.”

“Oh,” said Peter. “Sorry—”

“Don’t get me wrong. You seem like very nice kids. It’s only I barely know you, and all that. And it’s not like there’s dozens of True Contradictions to go around.”

There was an awkward silence—not unlike that which descended on a room of scholars who realized they were all interviewing for the same job.

Alice felt a bit wounded, for she had thought they were getting along quite well. But then she supposed, from Elspeth’s perspective, they were no different than the Kripkes. They’d both only come to Hell for research purposes. And they were both Cantabrigians.

“You’re welcome to stay on the boat, though.” Elspeth gathered up their plates, tipping the bones carefully into a tin can. “I’m not like Nick and Magnolia. I won’t drain your blood in your sleep. Only I hope you’re not offended if I don’t share everything I know.”

“No, of course.” Peter’s voice was curiously flat. Alice could not read his face. She thought she saw something dark in his expression, but what to make of it, she didn’t know. “You’ve been very generous. We couldn’t ask for more.”

“Anytime,” said Elspeth. “We’ve got to look out for each other, we magicians. It’s a sad world when we don’t.”

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