Katabasis — Chapter no 19

Chapter Nineteen

Right.” Peter hoisted his rucksack over his shoulder and turned to trudge up the shore. “Good luck to you.”

Alice scrambled to her feet. “Where are you going?”

He did not reply. She watched him for a moment, baffled, and then hastened up the shore behind him. “What are you doing?”

Still he did not reply. She seized his sleeve. “Murdoch!”

“Let go.”

“Tell me where you’re going.”

“Why?” He wrenched his arm away with such vehemence that she stumbled back. “You’re not coming with me.”

“We can’t split up, it’s not safe.”

He barked out a laugh. “Safe, she says. Safe, says the girl who would

have damned me to the Weaver Girl.”

“I didn’t—”

“That was wrong, what we did. Elspeth was right to cast us out.” He turned away from her and kept trudging. “I’m finished.”

“Murdoch.” She followed behind him, pathetic—but she didn’t know where else to go. “Please don’t hate me.”

He laughed again. This time there was a desperate quality to it; the sort of laugh that was seconds from a sob. “I don’t, Law. But I’m quite sure that

you hate me.”

“I don’t hate you.”

“Then you must think very little of me,” he said. “Because ever since we got here, I’ve only felt—I don’t know, this coldness, like you don’t even care I’m here.”

“I never asked you to come,” she said. “I would have gone alone, you’re the one who wanted to come with—”

“Because I thought we’d be better off together.”

“Or because you wanted a sacrifice for exchange, isn’t that right?”

“I told you, that’s not what I had planned—”

“Well, that’s rich,” she said. “Seeing as you had my name underlined thrice in your notes.”

Peter spun around. The fury in his eyes made her flinch; she had never before seen Peter so angry. “I don’t have to justify myself to you,” he said.

“But if you think I’m that kind of person, Law, then you’re better off continuing through Hell on your own.”

He continued up the slope. Alice stared after him for a moment, then followed. She didn’t have a plan; she only knew she had nowhere else to go, and if she lost Murdoch, she was lost altogether.

Her foot stuck. She teetered, nearly lost her balance. She wrenched her foot free—then bent down to take a look, for the sand seemed wet, but that didn’t make any sense, for they were getting further from shore.

Up ahead, Peter was bent over his ankle.

“Murdoch!”

He didn’t respond. She started toward him—but suddenly, her legs would not move. She tried, but something rooted them in place, and when she glanced down, she saw a hand. Alice screamed.

Dead arms burst out of the water. Alice jumped away, but her feet splashed into a deep recess, and she lurched to the side. She saw then they were not on solid ground at all—what seemed like muddy ground was sand sticking to the surface of water, whole stretches of water, lurking in wait.

A force yanked against her knee. She collapsed sideways into the bog.

She felt a shock of icy water. She opened her eyes. She wished she hadn’t. For she saw then an entire lake full of Shades, biting and twisting and pulling against one another. Their faces were horrible, their eyes blazing red, their mouths stretched wide with fury. She could not see where it ended. They seemed to go on and on forever, a bottomless descent of stifled fury, stretching all the way down into the lightless dark. Sullen in black mire, Dante had reported. They gurgle in their gullets.

She kicked. Her foot connected against something solid, something that gave her leverage. The weight around her leg vanished. She swam up, broke the surface. She flailed about, seeking purchase. There—her hands scrabbled against hard stone. She pressed her fingers down, hauled herself up. She crouched against her perch, trembling—then saw, just beyond, what seemed like a stretch of rock sticking out from the water. She shrugged off her rucksack and threw it forward. It did not sink. Alice crawled on all fours toward the stretch.

The bog was silent behind her. All she could see was bubbles.

“Murdoch?” Her voice was a tinny choke. She spat water out into the bog and tried again. “Murdoch?”

A hoarse gasp. Peter broke the surface several feet away. A tangle of Shades rose with him—fingers clawing against his face, his eyes, his shoulders, trying to drag him back down. Alice crouched on her knees, panicked—he was too far to reach, and her hunting knives could do nothing from here.

She yanked out her Perpetual Flask. Bog water was not Lethe water, she reasoned. These Shades, furious as they were, might be afraid of oblivion yet. She could not aim—there was no aiming anyway, for Peter was enveloped now in a frothing mass of dead souls. She could only fling out black water in a shaking arc. Droplets sailed through the air and landed on the bog with a sharp sizzle, like water hitting a burning pan.

The Shades fell away. Peter splashed through the bog toward her. Three strides, two strides—he stopped, dragged under, then popped up again. A Shade hung off his rucksack, teeth sunk into the upper pocket.

“Take it off!” she shouted. Peter wriggled between the straps, freed one shoulder and then the other. The Shade sank back into the bog with a plop.

Peter lurched forward, hands splayed at Alice. She grasped his arms and pulled him up.

Together they huddled, pressed as close as they could against one another, unable to do anything but breathe.

“The ridge,” she whispered. She could see the narrowest strip of land— and beyond that, a ridge of rock above the bog. Stable land. “Can you make

it?”

Peter nodded.

She stood and tiptoed forward. She nearly fell; Peter steadied her.

“Thanks,” she gasped, but he did not let her go. His fingers closed round her arm, viselike, and stayed there the entire time that, step by step, they made their way through Wrath.

THE RIDGE WIDENED INTO A THICKER strip of rock, just large enough for a human body to lie on with hands spread out. One by one they stumbled up the edge and collapsed. Alice rolled onto her stomach and lay there for a long while.

“We have to go back,” said Peter.

She sat up. “Go back where?”

“The Fields of Asphodel. Over the wall.”

“Are you mad? The wall is gone—”

“We’ll beg. We’ll find the guardians, we’ll tell them we’re alive, we’ll

plead to be let back up—”

“What—why?”

“Look at us.” He flung up his arms. “My pack’s gone. Whatever’s in your pack is all waterlogged. Who knows how much of the chalk still works. Without food or water we have three days, if that. And how are we going to spend it, Law? Chasing down something we don’t know exists, or

finding our way back home?”

“But then we’ll have wasted—”

“It’s wasted. It’s already wasted. But please, Alice.” Peter’s voice cracked. “I don’t want to die.”

“We could die anyways,” said Alice. “There’s no—I mean, we took the boat . . . I don’t even know how we’d get back to the wall, or the fields—”

“Then we find any deity along the way and beg,” said Peter. “We might even beg the Weaver Girl, she might take pity—”

“Or she’d trap us here forever! There’s no guarantee—”

“But the odds are still better than if we forge on ahead, don’t you think?

At least the lower courts are predictable. We have no idea what we’ll find

up ahead.”

“But we’ve already come this far.”

“You know,” Peter said, “the sunk cost fallacy is one of the most

common failures of everyday logic.”

“Oh, fuck off, Murdoch—”

“Which is remarkable, since everyone knows what it is, they just won’t let it guide their reasoning.”

“Bugger the sunk cost fallacy,” said Alice, committing it all the same.

“We’ve given up too much, Murdoch. Half our lifetimes.”

“Half is better than none.”

“But think of what they’ll say. The idiotic venture of Murdoch and Law.

Went to Hell, and have nothing to show for it except mild amnesia.”

“At least we’ll be back,” said Peter. “I think I could put up with any amount of laughing if I were alive, don’t you?”

“Sure,” said Alice. “Fine. Then I don’t suppose you know a way back over that bog.”

They stood silent for a moment, staring over the hilltop. From this vantage point it did seem impossible to find a way back to where they’d come from. The bog stood between them and the shoreline, and there was no clear path through the mountains that ringed Wrath on all sides. Elspeth had brought them over Greed by boat; it was unclear where the path through led. The only stable patch in sight was the ground they were standing on, and this led deeper into Wrath.

“Let us go as far as Tyranny,” Alice proposed. “If we don’t stop to sleep, then we can cross two courts in one day. And the chances are better than not that we’ll find Professor Grimes there.”

“That still doesn’t solve the problem of how we’ll get back.”

“But then at least we’ll have the three of us, won’t we?” Alice forced her voice to brighten. “I’m sure he’ll be able to think of something, he’s probably got all sorts of tricks we don’t know about—”

Something shifted in Peter’s face, but it passed just as soon as she noticed.

“Fine.” His voice was carefully level. “I’ll carry the pack.”

Her fingers closed reflexively around her straps. “It’s my pack.”

“I mean only that it’s heavy,” said Peter. “We can take turns.”

She hesitated, and then shrugged it off and handed it over. Peter strapped it on, stretched his arms out, and without another word began to plod forward.

Alice could just make out a path through the bog ahead; a winding line thin as a pencil tracing. It trickled up through a dip between the distant peaks, beyond which all she could see was thunder.

Four courts left. Violence, Cruelty, Tyranny, and the last—the nameless, final court. Orpheus would not speak of it at all. The Buddhist accounts referred to it only as the final Hell, the dwelling place of nameless evil.

Dante claimed it was heresy, but like so much of Dante, this seemed like Christian dogma getting in the way.

Alice hoped they did not get that far. Cruelty had to be the end of it.

Tyranny, at the worst. Professor Grimes’s sins were many, yes. She was not in denial about that. But Alice could only understand him as tragically flawed, a man who made mistakes on his journey to greatness. Never malicious. Only careless. Only a man whose mind was larger than the rest, a

genius burdened with purpose, who couldn’t spare attention for the damage he left in his wake.

THEY SETTLED INTO A MISERABLE RHYTHM plodding through the valley; Alice leading, Peter following, stepping gingerly across the tenuous, snaking strip of solid ground. The bog bubbled and boiled about them. Every now and then Alice could see through the translucence to a horrid tangle of Shades beneath, clawing and climbing over one another like crabs in a barrel. But so long as they kept to their path and did not disturb the water, the dead did not disturb them.

Soon they passed into Violence, a barren desert punctuated by rocks.

The bog dried up, and the rocky ground smoothed into sliding silt. The mountains grew smaller and smaller in the distance as they walked, and by sunset all they could see for miles around them was flat ground. Every now and then something howled in the distance. Alice and Peter did not care to investigate.

Night fell. They did not stop; only switched on their torches and kept plodding along. Dimly Alice registered that her legs were aching, her neck and shoulders throbbing. She forged on. She was glad she at least had practice in ignoring her body’s protests. Night after night in that office she had ignored her own need to eat, sleep, or sit down. She was just a mind, floating in the dark, soaring over the terrain. As long as she convinced herself this was true, she could almost forget her body existed at all.

“Alice.” Peter stopped walking. He pointed his torch straight in front of

him. “Look.”

Alice drew up beside him. “What?”

“Those boulders,” said Peter. “They’re arranged in the same configuration as the ones we’ve just passed.”

Alice waved her torchlight between the boulders. A short, round ball and a long, rectangular slab. Had she seen them before? She hadn’t noticed; all she had been looking at for the past mile was the ground before her feet.

“Probably there’s lots of rocks in Hell,” said Alice. “Probably there’s lots in this shape.”

They kept walking. Five minutes later they arrived at the same boulders.

The little man and the tall man. She couldn’t fail to notice them this time.

They matched precisely her memory—the cracks atop the sphere, the long

groove along the slab.

“We’re going in a circle,” said Peter.

“But we can’t be.” Alice felt a tingle of dread. “Wrath is behind us, the sun was before us, the river on the left, I don’t understand . . .”

Peter dug into his pocket and pulled out a soggy lump of Lembas Bread.

This he crumbled in his palm and scattered at the base of the boulders. With the remaining crumbs he left a little trail out from the base.

“There,” he said. “That will settle it.”

They trudged on. In five minutes they came back upon the boulders and the crumbs.

Peter touched a hand to his temple. “I feel—I don’t feel right.”

Alice felt it too; a faint roil in her gut, a dizzying lightness in her head.

At each individual moment her bearings seemed to make absolute sense, with a clear path forward, but every time she took a step it all changed.

“Look,” Peter said. “Do you see that line, there?”

He slung off the rucksack, knelt, and crawled forward on his hands and knees, feeling around in the sand. Alice had to squint a moment before she saw it too—a curved, slightly raised line in the sand, forming a barrier around the boulders. She followed the arc of the curve in a great loop behind them, encompassing the ground from which they’d come.

A perfect circle, she bet. All magicians could draw a perfect circle.

“Mother of God.” Peter spread his hands around in the dirt. “It’s an

Escher—”

He vanished.

Alice had time to shout, just before the ground opened beneath her too.

She fell a short distance, then landed with a whumph on her back. Stars exploded behind her eyes. But the dirt was soft, and the pain passed quickly. Soon she was able to sit up and wipe the sand from her eyes.

“You all right?” Peter’s torchlight danced above her. She saw his face,

wan and scared.

“Yes,” she breathed. “But where . . .”

Peter arced his torch in a circle around them.

They were in a pit. Man-made, not natural; its sides were too flat, and they met the pit’s bottom at clean, ninety-degree angles. They were about fifteen, twenty feet deep. The surface seemed tantalizingly near but clearly

too high to jump to, and still too high even if Alice balanced perfectly on Peter’s shoulders and stood on her tiptoes.

Alice felt around in the dirt until she grasped her own torch. Together they scanned the smooth dirt walls until Alice’s light landed on something angular, protrusions in the corner.

“Steps,” she breathed. She swung her torch round the walls, following them up. Thank God—they led all the way to the surface. They were not nice steps; they were short blocks embedded in the dirt, just thick enough to balance one foot at a time. But they went up.

They climbed, pressing their chests against the wall for balance. And Alice should have known they would never reach the top—she should have known the moment she saw that circle in the dirt—but still dread pooled in her stomach when they turned the first corner, and the surface still looked as far away as before. They kept going round a second corner, then a third, for fool’s hope, but the distance never changed. They were still less than a foot off the ground.

“Damn it.” Peter jumped down. He smacked a hand against the wall.

“It’s Penrose stairs.”

She recognized the patterns as soon as he said it. They’d been thrust into a nil-geometry space; they’d been spinning around an illusion. The stairs were never going to lead them out; for the stairs, impossibly, made constant ninety-degree turns in a continuous loop. They were stuck in someone’s Escher trap.

Maurits Cornelius Escher, a Dutch architect turned experimental artist, became well-known in the mid-twentieth century for his illustrations depicting physical planes that could not exist. His work founded an entire subfield of visual magick that used illusions to warp physical space. Few found success with Escher techniques, as they required artistic proficiency, speed, and the ability to translate multidimensional artistic representations into algorithmic language. Until the late seventies, that subfield was dominated by Nick and Magnolia Kripke.

“Find the pentagram,” Alice whispered. “Find the flaws.”

Peter was already on his hands and knees, poking through dirt and upturning stones hoping for any trace of telltale chalk. But Alice knew it would be futile. Any magician worth their salt would have hidden the pentagram beneath layers and layers of dirt.

Cuck-oo.

They both jumped.

Cuck-oo.

“Jesus,” said Peter.

He shone his torch to the surface. High above them, nestled within a boulder’s groove, was a cuckoo bird on a spring; the insides torn out of a clock. Cuck-oo. There was one just like it in the graduate students’ lounge, its sound set excruciatingly high. And when the bird came out, on the hour, it had the effect of motivating everyone to put down their teacups, get up, and leave. No one could bear that sound, reminding them the day was dwindling, marking wasted time. This one hovered back and forth on its rusted spring, peeking out in thirty-second intervals. Its call was not loud, but it spread and spread; the pert chirp fading into wind howling across the sands. A signal, thought Alice. Come here. We’ve found something.

Elspeth’s grim smile rose unbidden in her mind.

Why do you think they love the living?

Alice tried to slow her breathing.

You couldn’t think when panicked—this lesson was drilled into every young magician. She tried to straitjacket her mind into the focus needed to solve an exam set. Because this was just an exam set, a very difficult one, and it wouldn’t do to lose her head. She had only to ignore the stakes, and remain calm as she went through all the standard routine of undoing another magician’s handiwork. Find the pentagram, find its flaws—weak phrasing, awkward constructions—and then undo the unreality with another layer of artifice . . .

But there was no point. The Kripkes had had a very long time to perfect their arts. Their work was seamless. It showed in their bold, sure lines; the cleverness with which they’d embedded every stroke into the landscape.

And the longer she searched, the more a pressure built in her chest.

Alice was well familiar with this creeping dread. There came a point with almost every research project where you understood it was time to stop trying—that all that time and effort sunk into a once-hopeful hypothesis were simply leading nowhere. And maybe you could try to forge ahead, but once that seed of doubt was lodged within you it only kept spreading, its tendrils growing through your lungs so that you couldn’t breathe or think, and that the more you tried to scrape some positive result from your efforts the more the threads of the project kept coming loose, the sands shifting

beneath you, until all the artifice fell away and you were forced to acknowledge that this simply wasn’t going to work.

A trained magician was accustomed to this kind of panic. Science just meant failure, as Thomas Edison had shown; science meant knowing when to cut your losses and start over and accumulate new funding, new hypotheses, new materials and ideas. You could always go to bat again, if you knew how to play the game. You could always come up with something else.

Only this time it was a matter of life and death, and there was nowhere to start over. There was only the inevitability of the Kripkes and their blood- hungry chalk.

“No,” Alice whispered. “No, no, please . . .”

But it didn’t matter. The search turned up nothing, and everywhere she pointed her torch she found only seamless illusion, not a speck of chalk in sight.

Peter had given up. He was slumped against the wall, his head held between his hands. He was trembling all over, but it took Alice a moment to realize he was laughing.

“Elspeth was right,” he said. “We are such idiots.”

“Don’t say that,” said Alice.

“I was alive.” His shoulders shook violently. “I was alive, I was happy, I was fine, and still I came down here on this stupid errand—”

“It wasn’t stupid.”

“It was completely pointless—”

“We came for Grimes, it was worth it—”

“Oh, shut up, Law.” Peter pressed his palm against his forehead. “Can’t you hear how desperate you sound? All this, just so you could run back and

be his favorite—”

“His favorite?”

“That’s your whole thing, isn’t it?” He affected a cruel, high-pitched simper. It was the cruelest she’d ever heard him sound. “Oh, Professor Grimes! You’re so clever, Professor Grimes! Take me to Rome, take me to Venice—I just want to hang off your arm and drink an Aperol spritz—”

“Murdoch, stop.” She nearly slapped him. “You don’t know a goddamn thing.”

“Don’t I?” Peter’s eyes were red. “Aren’t you in love with him? Isn’t that the entire point?”

Alice didn’t know whether to laugh or scream. Surely he was joking.

But he only kept staring at her with those wet, sad eyes and Alice realized Peter believed what he’d said.

“I hate that man,” she said. “When he died, I felt like I could breathe.”

“Then why are you down here?” Peter whispered hotly. “Why on earth —”

“Because it’s my fault.” She loosed a shaky breath. Then said out loud the words she’d swallowed for months, because saying them out loud would make them true, and she did not want them to be true: “I killed him.”

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