Katabasis — Chapter no 8

Chapter Eight

They made camp when they were too tired to keep walking. Alice checked the time—one in the morning, much later than they ought to have slept, but they had both kept pushing through that last stretch of their hike, forcing numb feet onward along the banks. They were both rattled by the bone- things. Alice was unable to shake the creeping, sticky fear from her throat, the certainty they were being watched, and the only solution seemed to be putting as much distance between them and the bone-things as they could.

This, despite Hell’s purported infinitude and unreliable topology. Despite the fact that for all their efforts, whoever or whatever it was might still appear before them in a blink of an eye.

Alice sat, chewed through a stick of Lembas Bread, and tried not to let her despair creep. Fortunately graduate school had prepared her for this, the constant managing of despair. Everything was always falling apart; nothing in lab went right; you couldn’t afford groceries, your cottage had a rat problem, all your instructors hated you, you were always one step away from flushing all your life’s work down the toilet. You shoved it to the side of your mind and went to sleep and deferred it all to tomorrow when your brain again functioned well enough to pretend.

Peter hissed as he pulled a strip of gauze from his arm.

“How’s it look?” she asked.

“Not infected, I don’t think.” He held his wrist over the fire, examining the wound. “You’d be able to tell at this point, wouldn’t you?”

“Want some more antiseptic? Just in case?”

“Yeah, all right.” She passed him her travel bottle of merbromin. He dabbed a droplet onto his arm, then held out his wrist so she could rewrap it in gauze. “Thank you.”

She settled back against her pack and closed her eyes. “Of course.”

“Hey—let’s try something.” Peter pulled a box of chalk from his bag. “I wonder if we might speed things up.”

Reluctantly Alice lifted her head. “How do you mean?”

“Well, what’s the worst thing you’ve ever seen Professor Grimes do?”

“We’ve already had this conversation.”

“I’m not saying we should find the end point,” said Peter. “I’m just saying, maybe there’s another shortcut across the courts. Let’s just assume we have a good guess where he is. Suppose this—he’s done worse than greed, surely?” Peter drew an enviously perfect little circle by his feet.

These were called test circles: pentagrams drawn in miniature for safety checks before you stepped inside the real thing. These were best practice for spells that involved any movement or bodily alteration. You put your hand in the test circle, and if you didn’t lose your fingers, then you could chance putting your whole self in. “Worse than wrath?”

Alice thought of flying spittle, of mugs smashed across tiled floors.

Rare instances—but clear in her memory nonetheless. Professor Grimes never had patience for stupidity. “Probably, yes.”

“Then we ought to just skip ahead to cruelty, shouldn’t we?” Rapidly Peter scribbled a series of algorithms around the circle. It seemed to involve a lot of maths. Alice saw more geometry than she did Greek, and this made her head hurt. Peter set down his chalk. “What do you think, Law?”

“Hold on,” she said. “Backtrack. How does your shortcut work?”

He pulled his notebook out of his rucksack, opened it to a page in the middle, and tossed it at her. She took one glance and instantly her thinking mind shut down, as it always did when confronted with a lot of numbers.

“You need to explain that to me like I’m five.”

“Gabriel’s Horn,” he said happily. “Also called Torricelli’s Trumpet. It’s a mathematical paradox that bounds a finite volume within an infinite surface area. The plane of Hell is that infinite area, and in configuring us as the volume inside the horn, we could make a finite shortcut . . .”

“Sorry, what?”

“It’s a bit complicated,” he admitted. “You have calculus?”

She’d taken it in college; she hardly remembered it. That was one of the joys of specializing in linguistics: the escape from pure maths. “Only the

basics.”

“So then you remember curves, right?”

“Let’s pretend I do.”

“Basically, you rotate one branch of a hyperbola around its asymptote.

That gives you a shape that looks a bit like a trumpet. Hence the name! Very apt, eh?” Alice was too confused to laugh. Peter looked disappointed but continued. “Now you can calculate the surface area with these equations

here”—he tapped pertinent equations in the pentagram—“and also the volume here”—he tapped it again. “The surface area is infinitely big, just like Hell! But the volume, miraculously, is bounded. Some people call this the Painter’s Paradox, because you can theoretically fill up this whole bounded area with an unbounded amount of paint.”

She blinked at the page. “That’s just your twisted pseudosphere again.”

“It looks like the twisted pseudosphere,” said Peter. “Mathematically it is very different. You’re right that they both rely on some assumptions about hyperbolic space. But this spell doesn’t assume Hell is hyperbolic. Rather it produces a hyperbolic solid within the circle.”

Alice could never make up her mind on how she felt when Peter explained things. On the one hand, it was so condescending, the way he postured as if he were her tutor. On the other hand, he was very good at maths, and she really didn’t know this stuff, and competence was always

attractive.

“Murdoch, this makes no sense.”

“It’s a paradox, Law! It’s all a bit abstract, I know. But I think if I can draw the right equivalencies, we might bound the infinite space of Hell into something like—a shortcut. A wormhole, sort of. Here: I’m going to make a shortcut ten yards to your left, just to demonstrate. You’ll see my hand stick out of the sand. Don’t be alarmed.” He chanted out his incantation—two steady minutes of incomprehensible geometry and calculus, and then waggled his fingers over the circle. “Voilà.”

Nothing happened.

Alice peered at the ground. All the silt inside the pentagram looked the same to her. “Well?”

“Huh.” Peter frowned at his inscriptions. “That’s funny.”

“What’s wrong?”

“It’s not sticking.” He poked at the dirt. “The ground, it’s—it’s swallowing it, almost.”

Alice slid her fingers through the sand. It was true that chalk held better on firmer surfaces, but the good brands left smooth, solid lines no matter what the surface. And these dirt particles didn’t seem particularly special in any way. Perhaps they were darker, more glassy, more fine and siltlike than the sand particles you might find at a beach. In grade school, she’d done science fair experiments with cornstarch where it held solid in your hand if you squeezed it, but melted if you let it go. The silt felt like that. Solid to

the touch, until you weren’t looking. Discomfiting, certainly. Still, it was just sand: solid, stationary, dry.

“What grade are you using?” she asked. “You’ve got to go softer with sand.”

“I’m using 5H.” Peter clawed at the pentagram. An obsidian stream poured from his fingers; no white particles in sight. “Look! It’s not that it doesn’t draw. It just—it faded away. Like the silt absorbed it all.”

“Have you ever tried this spell yourself?”

“No, it’s new . . .”

“Well, could be you’ve missed something.” Alice pulled her own chalk out and arced out a circle beside her feet. “Small errors in the margins can make the pentagram erase itself. It’s rare, but it happens sometimes, especially in linguistics.” She began tracing the premises of the Sorites Paradox. Just a basic spell, something they all learned in their first year.

Sorites spells did not achieve great effects, but still no one had ever come up with a satisfactory debunking, and so they always worked at least for a little.

“A heap remains a heap,” she recited in Greek. “Remove a grain, and the heap remains . . .” Her voice faltered.

Her pentagram, like Peter’s, sank away into the silt.

No Barkles’-over-Shropley’s superiority, then. “I don’t understand.” She pawed at the sand. She could not see even a hint of white. All trace of the chalk was gone. “That shouldn’t—it’s never not worked before.”

Peter scooped a handful of silt into his palm and poked at it with his fingers. “I wonder if it’s a problem with Hell itself.”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean we have no understanding of Hell’s metabolism. Or Hell’s entropy.” He let the silt stream through his fingers. “Possibly its energy flows are all out of whack and it’s eating the chalk, eating its living-dead energy, instead of glitching against it—”

“But the sojourner’s accounts,” she said. “They were using magick the whole way through, and they were fine. Dante, Orpheus—”

“They weren’t drawing pentagrams, though. The magician’s accounts are all pre–Carne Abbas. They had enchanted objects, that’s not the same.”

Alice rifled through her mental catalog, trying to find a counterexample, and came up with none. “But that means . . .”

“That means we have no magick.”

Alice considered the implications of this, and dread congealed in her chest.

It was not that she was so reliant on magick to live. She was not like some older magicians, who habitually used magick so often for little things like brewing a pot of tea that they could not function without it. Wartime chalk rations had ended that culture. The magicians of her generation were minimalists; their work was about pushing the boundaries of known laws of the natural world, not about avoiding hardship. She had packed to hike through Hell without magical assistance. She had water and food and supplies to last two weeks. So long as they were prudent about their Lembas Bread, and did not lose their Perpetual Flasks, they would retrieve Professor Grimes and get back upstairs before they came close to starving.

Still. Alice was not particularly strong, fast, or skilled in any martial arts. She was quite sure Peter wasn’t, either. She had packed knives, sure, but what did she know about using them? They had nothing to wield against Hell’s deities and guardians, or the infinite demons that haunted its dunes.

Nothing against those bone-things. Nothing against their creator. The one proper defense they had against Hell was their magick, and without that, they were just two ordinary people—two idiot hikers, really—who’d ventured down here on a whim. And the archives were hardly crammed with stories of idiot hikers who’d made it to Hell and back alive.

Oh, dear—now her thoughts were racing. Visions swam before her eyes.

Stories she’d read, videos she’d seen. Lions stalking. Vultures circling.

Crumpled bodies at the bottoms of ravines. Chthonic beasts—were they worse than bears? She had become so practiced at keeping herself contained, but she’d forgotten that this was in the safe and contained circuits of Cambridge, where she had a thousand landmarks to reorient her racing thoughts. She had not accounted for new stimuli, for the stress. They go for your stomach first, she heard David Attenborough say. Not the artery, they don’t kill you right away; they want you fresh, unspoiled; they’ll eat you slow, you’ll feel every bite— Her chest felt tight. She looked at Peter, and saw bones.

“I feel so silly.” Peter kicked at his rucksack. “Shropley’s chalk makes up like twenty percent of my pack weight.”

There is no bear, Alice told herself. This has not happened. Peter is not dead. You are still here. She forced a lightness into her voice. “Ah, Shropley’s is useless anyways.”

He waved a hand in mock horror. “Shropley’s slander!”

“Shropley’s crumbles upon touch.” Chalk—chalk was an easy subject.

She consolidated her thoughts around chalk. “Barkles has integrity.”

“Barkles writes like fingernails on a blackboard.”

“At least it writes!”

Peter snorted. “Did Gareth ever show you his Japanese chalk?” Gareth was a fifth-year logician. “He got it imported from Yokohama twice a month. He said it was the nicest chalk he’d ever written with. He let me try once, but I was only allowed one little circle, because he’d calculated how

long he could make each stick last.”

“And how was it?”

“Just felt like normal chalk.”

Alice laughed. This story was not that funny, but the laughter gripped her all over her body; her shoulders shook, her ribs hurt, and she found it hard to breathe. Air escaped her in odd, syncopated bursts. Oh, she really could not breathe. And then the laughter turned to sobbing and to her horror she could not stop; the moans came out of her without end, and then hot tears spilled out over her cheeks.

“Oh,” said Peter. “Oh, no, no . . .” One hand reached for her face as if to brush away her tears, then stopped abruptly in midair and hung there, confused. He drew it back. “Don’t cry.”

“Sorry.” Alice wiped her eyes. Oh, this was terrible. To break down in front of Peter Murdoch, of all people. Now he would certainly think she’d gone mad. “Sorry, I don’t know why—”

“It’s fine.” Peter gave her shoulder an awkward pat. “It’s going to be fine.”

It was so manifestly not fine. Here they were trapped in Hell, still with no idea where to find Professor Grimes and packs upon packs of chalk that didn’t even work. Hell felt terribly real all of a sudden, no longer a dreamscape of rolling dunes and buildings emerging from mist. It was a place that could kill them. The magnitude of their plight hit her all at once.

It was the first time since they came to Hell that she’d perceived any real danger. And honestly, when she thought about it—when she really considered the bloody mechanics of it, and not just its romantic abstraction —death frightened her.

“Would you like a tissue?” Peter offered.

She took it. “How can you be so calm right now?”

“I don’t know. Why are you so freaked out?”

“Because we’re going to die.”

“We’re not going to die.” Peter pulled his legs up to his chest, rested his chin on his arms. “We’ll figure it out.”

“But how do you know?”

This she had never understood about him: his optimism, his sheer unflappability. Everyone Alice knew at Cambridge was constantly on the verge of a breakdown. Everyone but Peter, for whom life was only a lark through the meadow. Peter took the worst news with a blink and a shrug.

Professor Grimes would impose the most insane deadlines, and Peter would only laugh. She wondered if this was the consequence of winning every lottery of birth. You refused to think things could go wrong, because they had only ever gone right.

“Here—try seeing it like this.” Peter twirled a stick of chalk round and round in his fingers. He always did this when he was thinking, Alice recalled, and the familiar gesture was oddly comforting. “When I was deciding whether to come to Hell I asked myself which set of problems I’d rather deal with. And the problem of Hell seemed so much easier. It wasn’t even a debate. I suppose you made that choice too.”

“I—I guess.” Alice was rather shocked, actually, to hear Peter’s logic so closely mirrored her own. Though he articulated it so much more nicely.

For her, it had rather been a question of fuck it, nothing matters, everything’s gone to shit, so let’s go to Hell. But what, she couldn’t ask, had gone so wrong for Peter?

“Cambridge was a closed loop. No way out.” The chalk twirled faster.

“But Hell—Hell’s infinite possibilities. Isn’t it fun?”

“Fun?”

“Yes! We’re off the edge of the map, literally. Where theory meets its limits. Where the closed loop runs out.” He spread his hands. “Here there be dragons!”

She wiped her eyes against her sleeve. “That’s a pretty way to say we have no idea what we’re doing.”

“Wouldn’t be a contribution to the field otherwise, would it?” He nudged her with his elbow. “Trust your brain, Law. Trust the process. We’re Grimes’s students. Best in the world. We’ll be all right.”

Yes, thought Alice; yes, I can do that, I can believe that.

This was after all the trick of magick. There was a camp of analytic magicians called the Intuitionists, who argued the following: When it came down to it, magick was not really about how much complicated maths or logic or linguistics you had. Rather, the final push to make a spell work was just the power of belief. It wasn’t about the algorithms at all, it was about self-deception. You had to assemble enough proof to convince yourself the world could be another way, and as long as you could trick yourself, then you could trick the world. Even the non-Intuitionists practiced what the Intuitionists thought, because why not? You did the work, you drew your spell, and still at the end, you closed your eyes and hoped. When it came down to it magick was a wish, a prayer, and a little, anchoring fiction.

So was personhood, for that matter.

So was a coherent subjectivity.

And so was the courage to get up every morning and not plan to die.

It wasn’t so difficult. Alice was very practiced at this. She knew the mental gymnastics involved: you assembled the smallest staircase you needed to get through the day and as long as you held the steps in your head you would make it to the next. So she took a deep breath, shut her eyes, and climbed her staircase.

I am Alice Law. I am a postgraduate at Cambridge. I study analytic magick. I am in Hell. And everything is going just fine, just fine, just fine . . .

A blur shot across the flame. Peter jumped, Alice shrieked—but it was only Archimedes, reappeared from wherever he’d fucked off to. He looked properly spooked—fur frizzed, eyes wide, his pupils dilated to pinpricks.

Alice lifted her elbow. He needed no further invitation; he hurled himself against her ribs.

“Now, what happened to you?” Alice murmured, scratching his head.

Archimedes pushed his face into her side and stayed there, quivering.

Something had gotten him in the side, Alice saw. Dried blood streaked

across his fur.

“Bone-things, was it?” Peter asked.

Archimedes swished his tail, which seemed like a yes.

Had any of the sojourner’s accounts mentioned this lurking threat? Alice racked her mind as she stroked Archimedes’s trembling flank but could think of no mention of the bone-things. Orpheus, Dante, Aeneas, Lucian, Seneca, Saint Brendan—their accounts were doom and gloom, no doubt, but the dangers they described were divine and obvious. They ran from

Satan. They quarreled with gods. But no one mentioned the skittering creep, the terror of being watched by something not of Hell’s own making.

No one except Eliot.

The Waste Land came to mind, the most recent sojourner’s account on record. Your shadow at morning striding behind you, wrote Eliot. Your shadow at evening rising to meet you. Alice shuddered as she stared out over the dunes.

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

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