Katabasis — Chapter no 9

Chapter Nine

To Alice’s great surprise, Archimedes was still with them by morning. She suspected he only liked them as human shields, but she could not complain.

Cats had many talents, and one of them was finding paths. Once they’d finished breakfast (Archimedes demanded, and ate, an alarming amount of Lembas Bread mixed in with tea), he marched several steps forward, tail pointing straight up, and glanced back expectantly at them.

“The second court?” Alice asked.

Archimedes blinked as if to say, Where else?

“Is it very far off?”

Archimedes turned to show her his bum.

“Are you excited?” Peter asked as they packed up camp.

“What on earth for?”

“Why, the Court of Desire.” He waggled his fingers. “Filthy lust. Don’t you want to meet Jezebel? Bathsheba?”

She snorted. “You think Desire is all brothels?”

“I think it’s a treat compared to the dunes, at least.” He zipped up his rucksack and stood. “What do you think’s waiting for you?”

Alice slung on her own rucksack, caught a whiff of her armpits, and winced. “I’d be happy with a hot shower.”

Desire posed an interesting puzzle for Tartarologists, who widely believed that this second court was strangely more lenient than the rest. It was Dante who posited that lust, the sin of “carnal malefactors,” was a lesser sin; a sin of incontinence, weakness of the will, rather than active malice toward others. Those guilty of lust had made reason slave to appetite. Dante’s circle was full of lovers; mutually indulgent sops whose succumbing to their passions hurt no one but themselves. For this reason, many Tartarologists argued that the punishment of Desire, which by most accounts encompassed both lust and gluttony, was the source of addiction itself—both motivation of appetite and cause of harm. It trapped you with enticements; it made you the cause of your own suffering. Every other court

kept you trapped with locked doors and difficult challenges and vengeful deities, but Desire trapped you all on its own.

The sojourner’s accounts supported this theory. The Christian explorer John Bancroft described Desire as a false imitation of paradise wherein punishment lay in temptation. You succumbed, you indulged, and you were never able to leave. For three days I pillowed against breasts and thighs, smoking and drinking among the Lotus Eaters, he wrote. Only through sheer force of will did I leave their sweet company. O they cried for me, those poor women, and I as well at our parting. But they understood I was sworn to my divine mission, and were persuaded to let me go. And then he went on about the breasts and thighs upon which he had pillowed for another several pages.

“He won’t be in there,” said Alice. Professor Grimes had many flaws.

Overindulgence in appetite was not one of them; she had never met a more disciplined man. “We’ll be wasting our time.”

“Well, we’ve still got to check.”

“But suppose we get trapped.”

“We won’t,” Peter said cheerfully, trudging off after the impatient Archimedes. “We have extreme moral fortitude.”

ALL THE SCHOLARS ALICE KNEW AT Cambridge were so proud of rejecting their desires. It was the other departments that had sex addicts, drug addicts, alcoholics, foodies. But in the Department of Analytic Magick, gross sensual pleasures were looked down upon as a distraction from the life of the mind. Everyone liked to pretend they did not exist outside of their research, that their earthly bodies had no wants at all. No one admitted to watching television. No one kept up with pop culture. No one admitted to their professors that they were going on dates (to admit to being a sexual creature at all was so humiliating!). Those few who were married mentioned their wives and children with great embarrassment, and only to assure skeptics that the wives were managing the children. No one even admitted to liking the taste of food, which perhaps explained why the department only ever catered Yorkshire puddings that tasted of sand.

The only acceptable hobbies were those that honed the mind and body for sustained study in some way. Chess was mandatory. A light rambling was tolerable. Marathons were especially lauded because they demonstrated

the discipline and focus of one’s mind. It was rumored that Professor Helen Murray could run for hours at a time listening to nothing but operas she replayed in her head. Yes, leisure for self-improvement was allowed. But pleasure for pleasure’s sake—how useless, how embarrassing.

Professor Grimes was the most fanatic about his asceticism. “To learn is the most godlike thing we can do,” he told them. He had given them this lecture in their first years, back when they were foolish enough to think they could make time for things like sleeping or seeing movies. “Humans, unlike animals, are born with the faculty of reason. This places us above beasts, and near to God. And so as Aristotle says, we ought to be pro- immortal, and go to all lengths to live a life in accord with our supreme element. The life of the mind is all there is. Anything else is degeneracy, is bodily, is filth.”

Alice had tried, really tried, to obey his command. To whittle herself down to just the burning core of a mind. She stopped going to the cinema.

She stopped reading novels—goodbye, Henry James! She even stopped cooking for herself, since the campus butteries both cost less and took all pleasure out of eating. She could not reach the freakish discipline of Aleco, the postdoc who ran two miles every morning to the department; or of Chloe, the junior hire, who bragged she ate only one meal a day at five in the morning, and otherwise meditated if she felt dizzy. Alice did manage to imitate Harris the fifth-year’s habit of taking icy-cold showers every morning, in hopes that it energized one for the day, though she could not tell if her rush of excitement after the shower was merely due to her relief upon stepping out. There was the question of whether all this was character- building asceticism or simply the demands of poverty, since none of the graduate students made close to a living wage. But nobody liked to talk about that.

There was a period when she did succeed in curing herself of most mundane needs. Some days she would eat only a piece of Lembas bread with coffee for breakfast, and then become so absorbed in her studies that she did not think to eat again until midnight. Sometimes she managed to put off even the Lembas Bread until well after noon. She liked the light, absent feeling she got when her stomach was completely empty and she was running only on air. When she felt a pale and ethereal shade, a mind that existed without a body.

But the crash always came. Alice always broke; always ended up lying in a stupor on the couch watching without processing whatever came on the television in the cottage lounge. Never could she quite achieve that blissful intellectual Zen; that runner’s high of peaceful contemplation. More often she felt bereft; unsatisfied and unsatisfying, trapped in a body that needed.

And hungry, so hungry, for a kind of nourishment she could no longer name.

IT TURNED OUT HELL HAD INCLEMENT weather. The storm came on all at once.

The sky darkened, the air chilled and thickened. There was a crack of thunder, and then the sky poured down thick sheets of rain. This was bad news for Alice and Peter, who had not thought to pack raincoats.

“No way around?” Peter shouted to Archimedes over the winds.

The cat mewed.

The storm intensified quickly. In minutes they were soaked. The squalls of wind and rain whipped so fiercely around them they had to clamp their hands around their faces just to breathe. Archimedes stopped and refused to go on until Peter scooped him up in his arms and tucked him into his coat.

A miserable little huddle, they inched forth. Somewhere in the howling winds Alice thought she heard a weeping, a human voice, or many of them, but that could easily have been the winds themselves, which had risen to a deafening shriek. She could not tell how long they went on like this. She lost all sense of time. The storm stripped her of any thought, any sense. She was just a core, quivering against the squall, inching along.

Yet this, too, was familiar. Alice had survived several English winters now, winters of faulty radiators and broken umbrellas and surprise storms cracking above you just when you thought the skies had no more to give.

She had run all over Cambridge in those storms, and she knew that sometimes the struggle was not over indefinitely stretched space, but the simple agony of getting from one building to the next when the rain bashed like a hammer. So she knew to shrink into herself and press along, inch by inch, until at last they passed under Desire’s roof, between the bronze statues that guarded its entry. Not lions, Alice saw. Pigs. The doors swung open. Dripping and shivering, they tumbled inside.

Desire was a student center.

This greatly disappointed Alice, who despite herself had hoped for something out of those terrible Orientalist paintings—gilded sofas, hanging grapes, roast boars with apples in their mouths, and lute players in loincloths. Or even a deranged sight out of a Bosch painting—naked revelers, flowers growing out of buttholes, bodies copulating in giant mussel shells. Giant strawberries, crowns of cherries. Most of all she wanted to see some food. Of course it would be imprudent to eat anything —one was never to touch the food of Hell—but after those endless dunes even a facsimile of a feast would have been welcome.

Instead the lobby was all too-bright lights, high-top tables, and randomly arranged couches with suspicious yellow stains. At the center stood a fountain, from which burbled something thick and purplish brown.

From the ceiling, a musical number played over a faint, staticky crackle— some almost recognizable Dusty Springfield number, something you might close your eyes to and sway to before last call at the pub, a bit too soft to make out clearly either the melody or the lyrics. In the far corner sat a foosball table, abandoned, though when Alice glanced over the top she saw the little white ball still pinging about, knocking against wooden feet with a will of its own. Her hand twitched instinctively to try it, to see if she could

knock that ball into the goal.

“Oh, hello,” said Peter.

A Shade came shuffling from the corner, bearing a golden goblet in its hands. It seemed to move straight for them. Alice tensed then, suddenly frightened. But it was headed for the fountain.

“Excuse me,” said Alice.

“Hello there,” said Peter. “I wonder if—er, if you’ve seen anyone new pass by? Tall man in black?”

The Shade ignored them both. In silence it filled a goblet from the stream, took a long draft of that thick dark liquid, then shuffled on back to the hallway where it had come. It entered the first room on the right, and the door swung shut behind it.

Alice and Peter followed tentatively. Around the corner loomed an endless hallway resembling a student dormitory, rooms lining either side, uniform and windowless. Some of the doors were shut. Many were not.

They hung ajar, and Alice and Peter peeked inside them one by one as they strode through. A single Shade occupied each room. One lay flat on its back, hands wedged inside its pants. Another smoked a pipe in a room

wafting over with tobacco so pungent it sent Alice into a coughing fit as they hurried past. A third sat cross-legged on the floor, eyes closed, sipping slowly from that same kind of golden goblet they’d just seen. No one glanced up when Alice and Peter peeked in. No one seemed aware of their surroundings at all.

A few doors down, they heard a loud snuffling noise. A Shade sat hunched over a table in the corner. He held books up close to his nose, and every time he turned the page he sniffed up and down the spine, eyes rolling to the back of his head with pleasure.

“Carry on.” Peter gripped Alice’s wrist and tugged her along the hall.

“What was that?” she hissed. “What was he doing?”

“You’ve never sniffed a book before?”

“Not like that!”

“Well, it’s very nice,” said Peter. “Something about the binding. It’s like —glue, I don’t know. Wood shavings. I get it.”

Alice muttered, “I would simply have kept that to myself.”

Down the hall was more of the same: Shades upon Shades sitting freely in their cells, repeating singular, rote activities. Alice looked at every face as they wandered by, scanning for Professor Grimes’s scowl, but all she saw were blank, vaguely satisfied stares. It became hard to look at, after a while.

All those uniform expressions of complacency. Some of the Shades seemed to be losing their outlines, their faces smudged and blurry at the edges.

Some Shades seemed not to have eyes. Others had no definition to their mouths, ears, or hands—all senses extraneous to the drive, satisfaction at hand. They were caught in an endless compulsive loop with themselves, repeating a motion that apparently never gave full satisfaction, or was otherwise so delightful that they just kept doing it, again and again.

The whole place was suffused with an aura of decay. The hallway smelled of something foul and antiseptic both at once, like rubbing alcohol sprayed on rot, and the lights were too dim, crackling with fluorescent hum.

Cracks and patches of mold littered the walls, lines of ants ran along the stains, and it was all so foul that Alice was agonized that these Shades could not simply stop, take a look around, and flee the place. Stop it, she wanted to shriek, put it down, get out—but half these Shades did not even have ears. If she screamed to them, would they hear?

She and Peter had both long lapsed into silence. It grew progressively more uncomfortable, looking voyeuristically into these addictions, trying to

pretend they were completely unstimulated by anything they saw. Alice felt exposed and naked. She felt she was being tested, monitored to see if any of these enticements aroused similar interests in herself. Do you like feet? Do you like dolls? Do you like hard wooden objects?

What did Peter desire? Alice wondered. Probably nothing. Peter came into this world with a silver spoon in his mouth; Peter had never wanted for anything. But that was the wrong sense of want. Desire and need were very different, and she wished she knew what Peter craved, what made him weak in the knees, because then at least she would know that Peter had any vulnerabilities at all. Here, though, Peter’s expression never changed. He kept such a straight face; he only peered around with clinical, faintly condescending curiosity. Saint Peter could not be tempted.

The objects of lust kept growing to ridiculous proportions. They saw Shades fellating dogs, licking chalkboards, writhing upon beds of panties; Shades pouring wine in a stupor, Shades shuddering over furls of smoke.

One Shade paced back and forth murmuring Thank you, thank you as staticky machines played tapes of canned applause. It wasn’t remotely funny anymore—far from the sensational temptations of Bosch’s paintings, the sights in these cells were only sad and sickening. So much of the body was on display—breathy moans and slapping and licking and squelching; bodies pierced by needles, bodies choking on food, on wine; just bodies all around, not even full bodies really but reaching organs; working mouths and darting eyes and grasping hands, abandoned by reason, lost to appetite.

Why couldn’t they just walk away? Alice couldn’t understand it. She had never been able to understand this gross, physical desire. She was familiar with the basic pleasures, yes, but she had never felt such bodily longing that it overwhelmed her mind. It baffled her that in all the stories, heroes were constantly letting cities collapse so they could rub their bits on someone else. David lost his kingdom for Bathsheba, the Greeks gave it all up over Helen, and the great Dr. Faust, when he had Mephistopheles at his disposal, only wanted to use his newfound powers to seduce Gretchen. Sex was not a noble desire, it was such an embarrassing capitulation. There was a kind of genuine longing, Alice knew, but in her view it had so little to do with clumsy machinations of the body, with mashing teeth and sandpaper stubble, rough hands and foul breath. To her they seemed worlds apart, but she had never figured out how to sublimate it, this confused, burning want; this full-body desire she felt most acutely when she looked at—

“Gosh,” said Peter. “It just keeps going on.”

It was getting harder to keep walking, to keep peeking in; and harder to breathe; and the fluorescent hum and mold and damp were so much that finally Alice could not take it anymore.

“He’s not in here.” She halted. “Let’s go back out, let’s walk around.”

“I thought you wanted to check every court,” said Peter.

“Well, we’ve checked.”

“We’ve only been here an hour—”

“That’s enough to know. He’s not in here.”

“You said that about Pride, too.”

“Well, it’s true.” Alice sniffed. “He’s not here—he’s better than this—”

“How do you know that?”

“Because it’s all so pathetic!” Her head felt oddly light. She couldn’t understand why her chest was constricting, why it felt so hard to breathe.

“It’s base, disgusting—he won’t be here, whatever he’s done, it’s above that —”

“I don’t think so.” Peter’s voice was oddly cold then. “I think there’s

every chance he’s here.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“You think so highly of him.”

“It’s not a compliment.” Alice folded her arms. “Lust is a sin of incontinence. It’s a weakness of will—I mean, just look around us—and whatever Grimes was, he was not weak of will.”

“Jesus.” There again, that cold tone. It baffled her; she had never seen him like this, and she couldn’t understand why he was so angry. “Sing his praises some more, why don’t you?”

“I’m just scared of wasting time,” she said. “That’s all I’m saying.

We’ve seen enough, this isn’t like him, and I’m tired of walking through this stupid—”

Peter threw up a hand. Shut up, it said, the universal gesture—and Alice was about to voice her indignation when Peter pointed to a door down the hall. Faint, muffled noises came from within—shouting? Screaming? Peter cocked his head, eyebrows raised in a bizarrely suggestive manner. He lifted a finger to his lips and crept closer, motioning for Alice to follow.

“Don’t.” Alice felt an instinctive dread. “Please, Peter, don’t—”

“But there’s something,” he exclaimed. His steps quickened. “There’s someone.”

The muffled voices grew louder. Peter ran up to the door and threw it open.

Behind the door was an office. And in the office two shades were locked in torrid embrace, their faces blurred and unclear—all facets to their existence unclear and forgotten, in fact, except for bright, red genitals.

Neither took notice of Alice or Peter. One had the other bent over the desk in what looked like a terribly uncomfortable position, but both were going at it with frantic desperation, howling so loud that the sound shook the walls: “Oh! Oh! Oh!”

Was all sex so vulgar? Alice stood frozen, staring as the rhythmic exchange seared into her memory—the sloppy, wet squelching, the pulsing and throbbing of organs enlarged, exaggerated, the only defined feature of Shades who remembered nothing else—and then was superimposed on every other memory she’d ever had, every touch, every moment she had ever come close to another wanting body. All need, compulsion, satisfaction; and it was just bodies in the end, mounds of female flesh served up like pork, Marilyn Monroe’s splayed fingers, Jessica Rabbit, breasts bouncing. Jezebel dressed to the nines, leaning out a window, and dogs gnawing at her flesh. DJs laughed and the headlines whizzed. Fucking bunnies, fucking like bunnies, a jackhammer, a sledgehammer, iron into flesh, the needle the chalk and the ink, in and out and in and out, and it all culminated in a grip, a squeeze, a sigh. Alice tried her catechism, tried to reel it all back, but it did not work, the visions kept spiraling out, it was happening again. She felt so far away. Her body was not hers and she was drifting back, spilling out. She grasped for the staircase, but it was not there — Peter stepped back so quickly he stumbled against Alice.

“Wasn’t him.” He let out a hysterical giggle. “I guess—I thought—”

She reeled back.

“Are you all right?” He reached out to touch her arm, but she smacked him away. Just then she couldn’t stand his presence, any presence. If anyone came near her she would scream.

He reached out again. “You’re breathing all funny.”

She dashed past him back down the corridor. A terrible wrenching roiled her gut. He followed her down the hall. She pressed both hands against the first door to the outside she could find and pushed, spilling back out into the

storm. Then the world tilted, and the ground came near, and Peter caught her just as she keeled over and vomited.

“WHAT DO YOU DESIRE MOST?” PROFESSOR Grimes had once asked her.

They were sitting at a seaside café in Venice, drunk on victory and Aperol spritzes and baking in the afternoon sun. It was their first afternoon in the city; they’d just arrived from a weeklong hiking expedition through the chalk deposits of the Vena del Gesso with representatives from the Italian Academy of Magick, and now they were tanned and pleasantly exhausted.

Professor Grimes was lapsing into riddles and sophistry, and Alice, buzzed, responded lightly in kind, saying just enough to keep Professor Grimes talking. She loved when he just rambled, effortlessly profound, without an ounce of self-consciousness. She loved seeing how he processed the world; hearing his messiest, unformed thoughts. It gave her clues for how to imitate him, to model her life and career after his. She knew she was silly, thinking she could take up space in the world like he did when they presented so differently. But could she not at least remind people who her mentor was? Academic lineage mattered so much in the right circles. And back then all she wanted, with every fiber of her being, was for people to remember she was his echo.

“Nothing,” said Alice, trying to be droll. “I live the life of an aesthete.”

“Very funny. But what do you want, Law?”

“Success.” She fiddled with her glass. “I want a job, and a lab of my own, and several books to my name. I want your office and my name on the door,” she added, hoping to make him laugh.

But his face was dead serious. “Those are by-products of desire. What

do you want?”

“That is what I want.”

“No, it’s not.” He reached out and seized her wrist; squeezed it with surprising force. She winced but did not cry out. She was shocked more than hurt; frozen in place like a deer in headlights, all senses trained on whatever he did next. With Professor Grimes, she never knew.

“You’ve got to think about what keeps you up at night,” he said. “What burns inside you? What fuels your every action? What gives you a reason to get up in the morning?”

She was delirious from the force of his attention, and she so badly wanted to say the right thing. But she hadn’t a clue what that was.

“It’s got to be the work itself,” he said. His eyes were shiny with drink, and uncomfortably intense. She couldn’t keep holding his gaze; she had to blink and look askance. “The pleasure of analysis. You’ve got to love cracking things open to see what they’re made of. These trips and parties are nice, Law, but you can’t enjoy them too much or they’ll distract you.

You’ve got to float above it all. You must be fueled by the truth, and the truth alone. It must devour you.”

“Yes,” she wanted to say. “That’s it, that’s how I feel.”

But it wasn’t true, and she couldn’t articulate it as such. She couldn’t come up with a single research question that motivated her as much as he expected it to. In that moment she couldn’t remember why her research, tedious little projects into linguistic puzzles, mattered at all. And even if she weren’t buzzed on prosecco she would never have had the vocabulary to sort through the complex rush of fear and desire that got her up before dawn and kept her late at the lab.

Earlier that week he had given a lecture in front of the Italian Academy of Magick in Rome—a prestigious invitation, a named lecture that happened only every three years, which many scholars from around the world flew out to attend. Alice had watched from the first row, trembling with pride as he held in rapt attention the most discerning audience in the world, as words came out of his mouth in such perfect, articulate paragraphs, ideas hanging in the air like shining beacons. It didn’t matter that she had heard them all before, that she was in fact the one who’d typed them up, organized them into a structure that made any sense. It seemed like she was learning them for the first time, beholding their significance. A world of possibility hung before them, and he was its prophet come down from the mountains, illuminating it all.

I want that, she remembered thinking. I want that so badly—but what was that?

It wasn’t the old need for good grades, or a craving for validation. She was not a child anymore; she had left this pathology behind in college. But it wasn’t just the search for answers, either, or the simple satisfaction of a puzzle solved. It was a primitive thrill, a heady realization of what she could become, what worlds she could unlock, and it was all inextricably bound up in him.

“WE DON’T HAVE TO GO BACK in,” said Peter while Alice rinsed the bile from her mouth.

She screwed the lid back onto her Perpetual Flask. “Thank you.”

“You’re right, anyhow. I don’t think he’s in there.”

“I know.” She leaned back against the concrete wall, letting the rain wash over her face. Lembas Bread was disgusting the second time around.

She felt like she’d swallowed a handful of wood dust. It sat in her throat like acrid, concrete sludge, and no amount of swallowing could resolve the lump.

Archimedes twirled figure eights around her legs, which was just then the most comforting feeling in the world. She bent down and scratched him behind the ears. She wished she could lie down quietly and dissolve in the storm.

Peter did not ask what had happened, which was a mercy. “Let’s just

walk around, like you said.”

“Yes, okay.”

“I think it’ll pass soon, anyways.” Peter squinted against the storm.

“We’ve just got to get out of the range of the building. Do you think you

can make it?”

Alice was already striding on.

The storm felt a mercy this time. It all felt cleansing, the screaming winds, the sheets of rain, and even if it couldn’t wash out her memory, then it could for the moment drown it out, overwhelm her senses so she could think of nothing but struggling forward. And because they walked with heads bent, eyes squeezed shut against the rain, they did not see the pack until it was far too close.

Movement across the dunes; a rippling sheen of white. A moment longer, and the white disambiguated into all different shapes. A whole pack

of bone-things, nearly a dozen.

Peter saw it too. “Oh, Christ.”

Archimedes leapt out of Peter’s arms and took off at a full sprint for the dunes. This seemed a decent idea, so Alice turned round toward Desire. If they could just get inside, they might bolt the doors shut, or lean against them—but they’d already come so far. The bone-things moved horrifically fast. In seconds they’d halved the distance between them. They were about

a hundred meters away now.

“The water,” Peter shouted. “Get to—”

Alice followed him, rifling frantically through her rucksack as they ran.

She felt she had to do something, that she could not just stand there while their doom impended. She pushed past piles of chalk—useless—her blanket —useless—iodine, books, all useless. All she had was her hunting knives.

“Do you even know how to use those?” Peter asked.

“No.” Alice handed him the longer one, hilt-first. She’d bought them last-minute at the charity shop; she’d only unsheathed them once. “Would you like to figure it out?”

He hefted it in his hands, frowned, and held the blade awkwardly before him in a way that did not inspire confidence.

The bone-things halted in a line. They seemed much less afraid of the Lethe than their predecessors, for they had come right up to the shore, sandwiching Alice and Peter between them and the waters. They were of a greater variety this time—some as tiny as kittens, a few the size of wolves, and their skulls cobbled from every kind of animal. A few tilted their heads in a way that could have been cute; if only there were more than nothing in their eye sockets, if only their limbs were not magically enhanced with claws and fangs from other species stitched into every joint.

Alice crouched, since she’d read once in a martial arts novel that this helped in a fight. Bend your knees, lower your center of gravity, that sort of thing. She felt stupid.

“Hold on,” said Peter. “We might still—he might want to talk.”

Indeed the creatures had not moved. Their neck joints kept clicking as their gaze roved over Peter and Alice, as if processing every detail about them. Alice wondered where their creator was now. Whether he was waiting beyond for their dispatch, or controlling these things through some magical connection, seeing through their empty sockets.

“Hello,” Alice called tentatively. “Do—do you understand what we’re saying?”

The bone-things made no indication that they did.

“We’re just passing through,” said Peter. “We’re—we’re alive, as you can see. But we don’t mean you any harm.”

The bone-things crouched, preparing to pounce.

“Maybe we can talk,” Peter said. “See if we might help each other.”

Alice said, “We’re magicians too.”

The creatures sprang forth.

Alice slashed about, but it was hard to get purchase with her blade when the things came from so many angles. Blindly she waved the knife, and it seemed a good thing that metal clanged against bone—she thought maybe she was succeeding in fending them off. But there were so many of them, she didn’t know where to look, could only try to keep them from her neck, her face, her chest. Something landed on her shoulder. Pain exploded, white-hot, blinding. Alice cried out and slashed wildly at the bone-thing.

Her blade hit something by sheer luck—something critical, even, because the bone-thing flopped through the air and landed beside the water.

“Get the spines.” Peter was hacking at two creatures clinging to his legs.

A pile of bones lay at his feet. “Weak spots, try—”

Alice adjusted her grip on her knife and took a breath, bracing herself for the next flurry. But she noticed something then. The creature she’d flung away was not getting up. Instead it lay belly-up by the water, tail flailing, back legs skittering like some horrible overgrown cockroach.

She had a wild idea then.

A trio of bone-things crouched in formation before her, as if gearing up to take her head and shoulders both at once. It felt suicidal to turn her back on them, but instead of standing her ground she dashed up to the water. She tried not to overstep, but the Lethe’s waves surged unpredictably. Icy water brushed her ankles. She felt a pang in the back of her skull. A sharper pain in her upper arm. Memories fleeing? She could not tell what she’d lost, nor did she have time to probe. She unscrewed her Perpetual Flask, bent down, and scooped as much water as she could. Then she spun about and sprayed it around her in an arc.

Droplets hit the bone-things with a loud sizzle. Instantly they backed away. The water kept on sizzling where it had landed. At this sound even the creatures attacking Peter left off and shrank back, yipping and whimpering in unison.

“Yes,” she panted. “Don’t like that, do you?”

The remaining pack clustered in a huddle. The Lethe water was effective beyond her wildest hopes. She saw whole limbs dropping off, joints disintegrating. The water did something to chalk, melted and corroded it so that the entire algorithm turned black, withered, impotent.

Could it be this easy?

“Back.” She brandished the flask. “Back where you came from.”

All at once the pack coalesced and flung itself at Alice.

She had only time to throw her arms above her face. They landed everywhere else; teeth sinking into her clothes, her shoulder, her side, her legs. Peter shouted her name. Through the mess of bone she glimpsed him back on the shore, hand stretched for hers, but it was too late. Something sharp nipped her hip. She jerked round, and her ankle twisted. Her balance gave, and she and the whole teetering mass splashed backward into the water.

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