Katabasis — Chapter no 31

Chapter Thirty-One

Alice was no wartime magician, but all the military histories she’d ever read made a big deal about finding the high ground. So she tracked first to the river, and then she found a spot on a bluff where she could see the Kripkes coming from all directions. This bluff stretched into jagged overhangs that loomed above Lethe, and so she formulated a plan: to lure the Kripkes to the top and find some way of tricking them over the edge.

The drop was not far, but she didn’t need the fall to kill. She only needed to get them wet.

Then she roved the surrounding hills with a bucket of cat’s blood, dipping and drawing pentagrams on every spare inch of sand she could find.

This work was quite calming. It gave her somewhere to focus her chalk- screaming mind. Always it was so lovely to have a well-defined objective and clear parameters for success. In her college years Alice had participated in several Magick Olympiads, in which contestants were given half an hour to inscribe pentagrams to accomplish a series of tasks. Make the bowling ball rise to the ceiling. Move this pin from one end of a field to the next.

She’d racked up a half dozen medals for her talent in inscribing quickly and accurately under pressure. The old thrill of competition came back to her now. Forget the Kripkes for a moment, forget the likelihood of impending death, and win the game at hand. Here is a board, and here is your objective: to obstruct your opponents more than they obstruct you.

She pulled out the standard repertoire. At intervals across the field she inscribed all of Zeno’s paradoxes of motion: Achilles and the tortoise, Atalanta on the racetrack, the arrow in flight. If Atalanta wished to cross a racetrack—if the bone-things wished to cross the field to the bluff—she had to first get halfway there, and then halfway to halfway there, and then halfway to halfway to halfway there. But if you kept dividing the distances by half, then Atalanta had to accomplish an infinite number of tasks, and so she probably couldn’t budge at all. And if the bone-things wished to even move—if they, like an arrow, wished to traverse space from point A to point B—they must grapple with the fact that at any given moment in time, if you

took a freeze frame of their movements, they would be standing still. The time it would take them to reach Alice was composed of such given moments, but that meant they were always standing still, and never moving.

And they could never harm Alice if they could not move.

This was all silly stuff, as long as you had beginner calculus. But the bone-things did not have calculus.

Where the ground sloped toward the hill, Alice wrote out an expanded version of the Liar Paradox. This was a practical joke within the department that often had undergraduates stepping back and forth on the stairways, stuck like rocking horses:

THE NEXT STATEMENT IS FALSE THE PRECEDING STATEMENT IS TRUE

At the top of the mound, right against the ledge, she drew from memory a most special paradox. She had no clue whether this one would work, but she didn’t strictly need it to work. She only needed to show Nick and Magnolia something they’d never seen before. Something interesting enough to give them pause.

“You seem very prepared.” Gradus had been drifting at her heels as she worked, murmuring in appreciation all the while.

“You could help me fight them,” said Alice.

“What, and huff and puff until they all blow down?” Gradus blurred himself all over, as if to emphasize his insubstantiality. “I’m only a Shade, remember.”

“I’m sure you’re good for lots of things,” said Alice. “You could distract them, for instance. You could swoop and billow and yell very loudly.”

But she could tell she had overestimated the strength of their bond.

Gradus was fond of her only when it was amusing to be. And while she considered their time together very special, she was only a fraction of his deep time. In one thousand years he would likely only chuckle at her name.

“Ah . . . well.” Gradus made the sound of a throat clearing. She thought Gradus might say something more. For a moment it really did seem like he was considering it. But it was so much less awkward not to. Goodbyes were worth the effort only when you meant to see someone again. Gradus merely dissolved where he stood, solid grays fading to a shadow. There was a slight breeze, then he was gone. And Alice might have felt abandoned, but she

thought about it for a moment, and then concluded she didn’t have any real

grounds to be upset.

Humming, she returned to her work.

She checked all her pentagrams, made sure all the circles were closed.

She sprinkled sand across her handiwork, enough to hide it from a casual glance, not enough to interfere with the pentagrams’ range. She stood back, surveyed the now-smooth terrain, and nodded in satisfaction. She had laid a very good chessboard. It was the best anyone could do with a cat carcass and waterlogged chalk.

Then she retreated up the hill and watched for the bone army’s coming.

THE WAIT WAS INTERMINABLE.

Alice was filled with bloodlust and chalk dust, with nowhere yet to put them. She was long past the point of fear. She felt she was on a speeding train, fast approaching the crash, and she hated to feel the minutes pass because it was all putting off the end. Several times she thought or hoped she heard clicking, but they were only memories become too vivid. Each time she shook her head, like a dog shaking off water, and the clicking ceased.

At last she saw that roving line of white. No Kripkes in sight. Just a menagerie of reconstructed bones; dogs and cats and what looked like a small cavalry of raccoons.

This was a much larger horde than had attacked her and Peter outside Greed. She wondered if the Kripkes knew she was something special, if they had assembled all their best forces specially for her. They drew closer, covering the distance with astonishing speed. She counted under her breath.

Thirty white horses upon a red hill, she thought. First they champ. Then they stamp. The bone-things reached the base of the hill. And now they stand still.

She squeezed tight the hilt of her knife.

For a moment she was ready to fight the horde whole. She had forgotten that her spells did indeed work, and she was quite a good magician, until she saw the evidence. She had been right. The bone-things could not do calculus, and could not tell Zeno from God. A third of the horde slowed, and slowed again, and slowed down infinitely until their spindly little legs beat pointlessly into degrees of diminishing fractions. Only a lucky few

skirted round the piles of their incapacitated friends, and when they got up the hill this number was whittled to a mere handful.

The bravest among them approached her sniffing, cautious now. It had the slender, trembling build of a whippet.

“Stop it,” she told it sternly. “Go. Sit.”

The bone-thing yipped and sprang.

Alice smashed her blade against its side. It fell, and before it could get up Alice slammed the knife down again and again until its ribs cracked open and its limbs splayed at its sides.

Alice rose. “Anyone else?”

They all sprang at once.

But they were so slow! Alice could not believe how easy this was.

Snorting chalk had done something to her vision, had altered her perception of time and space. Her sight broadened and sharpened both at once. She could see every little bit of them, all the chalk that animated their joints, every stroke of the Kripkes’ meticulous handwriting. And she knew precisely where to hit them, so that the rest would fall apart. She knew when they would spring, where they were aiming, and where they would be. She knew to get there first.

Thwack. Thwack. She wielded a blade in her right arm and a flask in her left, sprinkling the air like a priest sprinkles holy water. The water dissolved their joints, and her knife did the rest, and a pile of bones began building up around her ankles as she danced.

God, what couldn’t she do? It was exactly that manic feeling she got when she’d drunk five cups of coffee and felt suddenly confident that she could master any field if she put her mind to it—that very brief high always followed by a dreadful crash. Only here the crash never came, and with each movement, as Alice’s blood pumped hotter, the world grew slower and slower until she had the frightening sensation that her mind might race right out of her body. But sanity held, and her mind and body did not come apart.

She hung there at the brink of transcendence, when all the world stood still and its fault lines pulsed visible. She had a flashback to those late nights in the lab, every time she’d blinked and seen the hidden world—and now it was all laid out in front of her, not in abstract, but in terrible concreteness.

Just bones to shatter. Spines to break.

If only Elspeth could have seen her! She recalled Elspeth dancing with her spear along the shore, and imagined her own movements now were just

as graceful. This was fun! She didn’t only defend herself from their hacking jaws, she made an art of it. She swung her blade in the prettiest, most elegant arcs. The philosopher Zhuangzi once met a butcher who was so practiced in his arts that his blade never dulled; he slid his cleaver through the hollow spaces, where he met no resistance. This is the Way, thought Alice; I see those hollow spaces. She sliced so cleanly through their spines she carved them apart in one blow. One poor runt she bounced off the hilt of her knife and decapitated in midair as it fell. This must have been how lumberjacks felt. Every time they swung an axe and wood cleaved in two.

What a pleasure, this tactile competence. Clean destruction—and the earth cracks beneath your hands.

When she’d dispensed with her attackers she descended the hill and dispensed with the trapped things, too. She felt it prudent to be thorough.

The Kripkes might free them, and then she’d be in trouble. But the Kripkes were as yet hidden, and her targets frozen in place, and their spines gave so easily when she chopped them clean through.

She thought she read fear in their bones. Yes, they actually trembled.

They could not move their legs, but they could quiver, duck their heads, shrink back in every imitation of living things fearing the whip. And this might have stilled her, but then she saw layered over their heads Peter’s wan face, and the knives grinding in midair. She swung. When the blade met their spines, the cracks sounded so pleasing that her delight drowned out everything else. She had never before felt the high of sheer entropy.

Indeed it felt so good to just make things fall apart. She wanted it to go on forever—was disappointed, indeed, when she realized her targets had run out; there was nothing more to attack.

Alice stood, chest heaving, and stared over the empty dunes. At her feet, a disembodied skull nipped at her ankle. She gave it a savage kick. It rolled, tumbling down the hill, then came to a stop amidst the carnage.

She’d demolished the horde. The fields were silent.

“Come on,” she panted. Chalk burned her nostrils. She had a wild vision of eating the Kripkes alive; of plucking their heads off their necks and chewing through them whole. “Come on out.”

THEY APPEARED SECONDS LATER—THREE FIGURES BOUNDING on the hill, their eyes black, and their bodies encased in armor made of bone. Papa and

Mama and Baby Bear, come back from our vacation. Goldilocks has been very bad in our house. Goldilocks must be stuck like a pig. Pouches hung at their waists—wet, full-to-bursting pouches that jiggled when they moved— and their arms glistened with fresh, red blood. Peter’s blood.

The Kripkes paused a moment to take in the carnage.

They conferred among themselves. Alice wished she could hear what they said, because they probably involved some compliments. Skilled magician. Oh, yes, very skilled. Probably trained at Oxbridge. We must be careful.

Then the Kripkes swept through the field.

Alice should have known her silly spells would hardly dissuade them.

And yet, the speed of their demolition dismayed her. Nick Kripke seemed not even to read what she’d written. One look at the exposed chalk, and that was enough. Blood arced freely from his pouch, and he tossed counter- spells onto the sand, dismantling her proofs without looking. He never broke his stride; even the White Horse Paradox hardly fazed him, and here Alice was certain that Nick had never studied Chinese. Theophrastus and Magnolia followed in his footsteps as one by one Alice’s defenses melted away.

Theophrastus paused briefly at the two-step Liar Paradox—his feet rocked back and forth as he sounded out the words—but then Magnolia tugged him aside and kicked the red sand away.

They looked up. They saw her now, standing atop her hill.

She saw them clearly too; their rangy, lean forms, their spiked and shining armor. The top halves of their faces were hidden under helmets made of bone, and the eyes she saw through the dead creatures’ sockets gleamed with sinister intelligence. They wore identical leers; thin lips stretched back to reveal sharpened, black-rimmed teeth. Magnolia’s lips looked so vibrantly red, the scarlet shine of department store lipstick.

Though Alice could not imagine where in Hell she found such bright pigment, except in blood.

Primitive was not the word. They had not devolved, like a family lost for months on a hike; they had not lost their faculties in despair. Neither did they resemble Elspeth, whose piecemeal attire was junk scraps made pathetic, homespun art. The Kripkes’ armor was flawless, tailored to indecipherable purpose. They are aliens now, thought Alice. They did not

move like humans; they did not think like humans. They had evolved and adapted to their terrain, become the apex predators the underworld lacked.

Every inch of her body wanted to flee. She had to shout down her instincts with her tinny rational mind. Run, and Gradus will mock you. Run, and you prolong what must come. Run, and your back is to the beast.

The Kripkes stopped at the base of the hill.

They watched her for the longest moment, all three heads tilted left to identical degrees. Nick and Magnolia conferred. Then Magnolia trudged up first, Theophrastus in her wake.

Alice’s mind went unbidden to the acknowledgments of so many monographs. Last of all, many thanks to my loving wife, who kept our house, set our tables, fed our children, typed up all my notes, and came up with most of my original ideas as well. My dear, you make our lives possible; your love inspires me.

“Who are you,” Alice scoffed. “The research assistants?”

Theophrastus broke away and ran screeching up the hill.

This seemed even to startle Magnolia, for she reached out to try to grab him. He evaded her grasp, scrambling on all fours at an inhuman pace up the sands, growling and yipping as if he were a wolf.

Alice saw a dizzying montage of all the misbehaved children she had ever encountered. Toddlers throwing fits at the grocery shop. Cousins over for the holidays, screaming their cheeks scarlet. Helen Murray’s squalling brood, whom she had once babysat for pocket change. The younger boy had pooped his pants and pretended he hadn’t. The older sisters had screeched with laughter and danced around singing that he stank, and the youngest one decided she was a lion and kept sinking her teeth into Alice’s ankles.

Alice remembered how children could be capable of such gleeful destruction; how they smashed and hit things with no care for the consequences; how at Helen Murray’s house, she’d had a guilty, violent impulse to smack one of them across the face. Most of all she remembered that children were a fright . . . but they were children—and so very, very small.

Theophrastus ran full-tilt toward her, and all she had to do was scoop him up by the arms and lift him flailing into the air.

He was very light. It would have been so easy to fling him over the ledge, but Alice did not want to hurt him; this was not his fault. She decided she would dump him in the Zeno trap. Time out, go to bed, let the adults

have a word. Alice dragged Theophrastus toward the pentagram, tussling as

he flailed.

Magnolia appeared atop the hill.

“You,” Alice panted, “are a very bad parent.”

She wondered why Magnolia did not attack. Then it occurred to her she might use Theophrastus as a hostage. The child stood between them— perhaps Magnolia was afraid Alice would hurt the child. Alice was pondering how best to make this threat when Magnolia grasped for her own left shoulder and popped the arm clean off.

Alice gawped.

Magnolia whipped her skeletal arm at Alice’s face. Cold bone smacked Alice across the cheek and jaw, rattling her teeth. Magnolia struck again, and this time the force of it sent Alice sprawling. Theophrastus wriggled free, shrieking and clapping.

Magnolia advanced, swinging her dead withered arm like it was some medieval ball and chain.

Alice scrambled to her feet. She felt a surge of indignant fury. The ridiculousness of it all. Peter had not died in the desert so she could be smacked around by someone’s detached arm.

Magnolia swung out again. This time Alice traced its coming. She caught it by the wrist and tugged hard. The chalk dust still coursed through her veins; she still felt a strength whose limits she did not know. Apparently this shocked Magnolia, for she offered almost no resistance. The arm slid clean from Magnolia’s grasp.

Right, Alice recalled. This was her advantage. The Kripkes were not

accustomed to anything fighting back.

Magnolia drew out her knife.

No, no, thought Alice. She flung the arm away, then flung herself at Magnolia.

Alice had never fought anybody. She’d been such a well-behaved child.

The closest she had come was a basketball game in elementary school, when she’d been so furious that another girl stole the ball that she lashed out and kicked the girl in the shin. They tossed her out of the game for that.

Her parents collected her and yelled at her in the car while she sobbed and explained she didn’t know why she’d done it, she’d never be so bad ever again. The lesson had been engraved in her mind ever since: Other bodies are inviolable and you do not touch them without permission. You do not

try to hurt or break them. You keep away and they will keep away in turn, see, everyone exists in their little bubble. So it was a great shock when she collided against Magnolia and they toppled, still wrestling, to the ground.

Alice’s chalk-dusted senses did not help her now. All she could perceive was thuds and swipes, spikes and sharp edges. She couldn’t see, her hair was in her eyes. She swung wildly with her own knife but could not tell if she made purchase. She thought she hit something, but it could have just been leather, just armor. She felt vaguely that she was losing. Then she was flat on her back, winded. Magnolia had her pinned down by her knees.

Magnolia’s knife came down. Alice flung her hands up against Magnolia’s wrist, straining to push the blade aside. But Magnolia was so strong. The knife pressed perilously close against her face.

Alice’s gaze slid to the pouch at Magnolia’s waist; crimson, bobbling.

Two principles clicked in her mind then:

We are in the Zeno trap.

She needs blood to get out.

Abruptly she let go of Magnolia’s arm. Magnolia, expecting resistance, lurched up and over. Her knife jammed into the dirt by Alice’s head. This gave Alice just enough time to wriggle forth and slash desperately at Magnolia’s belt. The pouch popped. Blood splashed across her face— Peter’s blood, rusty and salty and somehow still hot. The swell of memories nearly overwhelmed her—the Escher trap closing shut, Peter’s smile, the screech of iron—and it was all she could do to train her focus, recall those most basic algorithms. Blood filled her eyes and nose. She choked and sniffled, all the while gurgling out the words in Ancient Greek.

Magnolia swung her knife down above Alice’s head. Halfway through the arc her movements slowed to half, then half again, then half of that.

Alice could see her arms straining to move inch by inch, millimeter by millimeter, but it was no good, for the more Magnolia tried to move the slower she got, her degrees of freedom vanishing into one divided by squares of two, until for all intents and purposes Magnolia knelt frozen.

Behind her Theophrastus sat completely still, hands stuck midclap.

Alice scrambled to her feet.

The only things Magnolia could move were her eyes. She glared up and locked on Alice, gaze bloodshot and furious. Alice could read her frustration, her condescension. Zeno’s Paradox. A baby’s paradox. But to disprove it she needed blood, and all the blood was in the sand.

“Ha,” said Alice.

Magnolia’s eyes widened with terror. And at first Alice could not make sense of that terror, until Magnolia’s gaze slid to Alice’s knife, and she realized from Magnolia’s point of view, the rationally expected thing for her

to do now was to kill them both.

Alice had not thought this far ahead.

In all her fantasies the river had done the work, and she merely got to

stand by observing, absolved.

But what to do now?

Slit their throats, screamed the chalk in her blood. But her arm would not budge; the knife would not lift. She could only stand there, frozen in indecision, until Nick Kripke came running up the hill.

He paused at the top, looking between Alice and his wife and son.

Calculating, clearly: attack Alice, or free them?

She could not let him choose the latter—she could not fight all three of them at once.

She took a gamble. She turned her back on Magnolia and Theophrastus and sprinted further up the hill, where her masterwork lay waiting, all pieces in place except for the subject within. She was right. Nick followed.

She had counted on his curiosity.

Here was the only thing, more so than fresh blood, that could still entice him after all these years. A theoretical breakthrough, a piece of work he had never seen. The Kripkes were masters of their craft, but they only had what was in their own heads; all these decades and they had no access to the archives, to strange lines of thought stretching into other places and times.

Here at last was something Nick Kripke hadn’t spent decades picking apart and putting back together, and this was why Nick Kripke made the fatal

mistake of pausing to read.

Behind him, Alice chanted.

She read the lines off the script in her mind’s eye, substituting the words “Nicomachus Kripke” for “Jacob Grimes,” speaking faster and faster, before Nick understood what she meant to do, so that her voice was not intelligibly human at all but a high-pitched, garbled wail. A witch’s howl, Erichtho’s howl—and she was so near the end, only two lines away, when Nick whirled around with panic on his face.

His hands whipped out. Alice raised her arms, but he knocked them away. His hands wrapped tight around her neck. Alice choked but made no

sound. If she made no sound, then the incantation would not be ruined, and she would not have to start over. She had only two lines more to go, she only needed one breath of speech, if she could just stay calm and whisper them out. But Nick’s thumbs pressed hard against her trachea. She could not breathe. She twisted but found no purchase. His grip was so solid, the pressure painful, immense. Oh dear, she thought. But I was so close.

Then a screech, a flash of gray.

Archimedes flew down from nowhere and landed atop his head. Nick let go. Alice rolled gasping to the side. Nick flailed, arms windmilling.

Archimedes yowled as he clung to Nick’s head. His paws scrambled for purchase on that bony helmet. His great bushy tail wrapped with determination over Nick’s eyes. Nick seized Archimedes by the midriff and hurled him to the side, just as Alice closed the circle.

Now we’ll see, she thought frantically, now we’ll know if I’m a real

magician.

Hell fell away.

Not entirely. The spell did not transport them, it only established a link.

They were present now in two worlds at once. Hell’s sands were still faintly visible, but layered on top were the familiar maroon walls and blackboards of Laboratory Room Nine. Chalk-dusted floors, persistent mildew. On the floor, arranged neatly within a twin pentagram, lay the fake body Alice had so carefully prepared. All those grimy pieces, stitched up like Frankenstein’s monster; just enough muscle and bone and ligament to put together a face, all the necessary biomechanics to re-create a voice.

She was amazed no one had cleared it away after all these days. She’d been afraid they might tether up to nothing, that when she finished her spell they’d be pinned to some inescapable place in between worlds. But she had been so careful. She’d chosen the basement room no one ever used, locked the doors tight, and reserved it under someone else’s name, a postdoc who commuted from London and was rarely on campus. And she’d even inscribed some spells that slowed decomposition, so that even though the corpse reeked, it was still not rotted. Its tissue remained sufficiently intact to

house Nicomachus Kripke’s soul.

The corpse’s eyes fluttered open.

“Hello,” said Alice. “Welcome to Cambridge.”

Of course no sound came out. Perhaps she had spoken aloud in Hell, but here Alice was tethered to nothing. She could only watch, a disembodied

presence, as Nick Kripke returned to life.

One eye strained open, then the other. The torso flinched.

The parts animated by Nicomachus Kripke’s soul writhed on the floor.

The eyes bulged; the tendons strained. He seemed to be in enormous pain.

Erichtho’s notes had warned of this. The soul is wrenched from the underworld and forced violently into a dead or dying body that is not his.

Everything is wrong—every muscle, every bone and ligament—everything is too large or too small and so, so foreign, and he is in utter agony, every nerve in his body screaming, on fire.

It was so hard to read tone in Ancient Greek, but Alice thought the witch must have felt some wicked satisfaction in writing this. Alice had chuckled too, upon reading the pages. I’ll give you a body, Professor, I’ll bring you back. We’ll see how you like it.

But how awful it was to watch that spell in action; to see that ruin of a mouth twist open and emit the worst sound she had ever heard.

Magick was a mistake, Alice thought. These were unnatural bonds, this boundary should never have been crossed. She tasted bile, a roil of guilt— what had she done, she had to put him out of his misery—but then Nick howled louder, and the laboratory walls seemed to shake and cave in. The whole room glitched, like a dream world dissolving upon wakening, but did not fade away. The worlds bled into each other. Carpet turned to gray sand; desert turned to walls, it was all braided in a hopeless, disorienting mess.

But Alice was used to this. She had survived for so long seeing multiple worlds layered upon each other. Images winking in and out of place did not disorient her; she knew how to move within them. So while Nicomachus Kripke choked on the horror of life, Alice pulled him determinedly toward the cliff’s edge. They were so very close now, only several feet away. All it took now was a shove. The river would do the rest.

The lab room flickered away. This was not Alice’s doing. Nick Kripke’s force of will was immense. Alice saw him straining to concentrate, to free his soul. There was nothing she could do. Her spell established the link only; she had no power to trap him on either side.

Down in Hell, Nick Kripke jolted alert. His fingers closed again around

her neck.

“Release me,” he rasped.

No, Alice tried to say; but his thumbs pressed around her windpipe, and she could not budge. Black pressed in at the edges of her sight. His fingers

tightened. Her limbs slackened.

Divine grace saved her then.

That was how it seemed, anyhow. It was nothing so solid as a living being; only an impulse, a whisper. Just the echo of a presence. But still that touch was enough to tip them over the edge, into empty air. Onto the rocks.

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