Page 19 of Katabasis

Hands clapped against her temples, forced her gaze from the river and upon Peter’s face. She had not looked into those eyes up close in so long. What long lashes he has , she thought, miraculously long for a boy; what a lovely face, too, pity it makes me think of cruel laughter, slamming doors—

“Breathe,” said Peter. “Just breathe.”

Don’t patronize, Alice wanted to say, but by instinct she obeyed, and the whooshing in her lungs dimmed the river’s roar, just a little bit. She felt again the edges of her mind. Tired grooves of being.

“What’s your name?” asked Peter.

She knew the answer! Yes, her catechism—she had practiced this, this was easy. It all came out in one breath. The staircase reappeared, and up she climbed. “I am Alice Law I am a postgraduate at Cambridge I study analytic magick—”

“Very good,” said Peter. “Now can you follow me?”

Alice wasn’t sure; she had forgotten how to make her limbs respond to her command.

“Just look at me,” said Peter. “Hold on to me. There you go.”

Step by step they started back up the bank. Alice’s legs moved like lead. It seemed inordinately difficult to put one foot in front of the other.

“Almost there,” said Peter. “You’re so close. You’ve just got to finish out.”

She spoke as if in a dream, half-unaware of the words coming out her own mouth. “I feel sometimes it is so difficult to be conscious.”

“I know,” said Peter.

Such heavy feet. Like dragging rocks. “And I think anything would be easier. Anything at all.”

“There’s time for that.” Peter grasped her by the elbow; firm, but gentle. His voice was soft. “It’ll always be waiting, Law. But we’ve got things to do.”

On they trudged, following the path along the river.

Peter strode ahead and Alice kept pace in silence, feeling embarrassed.

The allure of the Lethe had diminished now that they were further off the bank, and Alice wished she had not made such a fuss.

She was not sure now whether she’d seen the Lady Meng Po after all.

Really, it was such a brief glimpse. She might have just been remembering a painting, or even a firm description become imagination.

Her memory did that sometimes; she confused memories and reality, her imagination was too vivid, she couldn’t help it.

But Peter politely made no comment, and Alice made no defense, and gradually they sank into a thoughtless, plodding trance.

Alice probed about her skull and found to her relief that the sloshing had settled, the rush faded.

The catechism had worked, and she had a grip on her thoughts once again.

“Hey.” Peter paused. “Haven’t we been walking awhile?”

Alice had not been paying attention to the time. “Have we?”

“They didn’t look so far apart,” said Peter. “The library and the next building. But look—does that building look any closer to you?”

Alice summoned the picture from her memory.

He was right. Before the gates, the campus had seemed as closely clustered as any typical campus, all its buildings no more than a five-minute walk apart.

But the Second Court, Desire, remained just as far away as it had when they had started walking.

Alice thought she could make it out in better detail now—it was a two-story building with ornate tiling all around the front and sides, and two bronze lions sitting guard at the front. But it had not grown any larger.

“I knew it,” said Peter. “We’re in hyperbolic space.”

“But that’s backward.” Alice did not remember much from geometry, but she did remember this. “With negative curvature, objects should be closer than they appear. Like with a convex mirror. Light spreads outward. So we should be there—”

“No, no. What we saw from the wall was a clustering at infinity. Haven’t you ever seen the Poincaré disk model? It’s like we’re walking on coral. Down here on this plane, things could be miles apart, and they would still look like a regular campus from a different plane.”

Alice did not know what the Poincaré disk model was, and did not wish to know. “So what’s the implication?”

“The implication is that we ought to go to the peak,” said Peter.

“Not your mythical peak again.”

“Now we have some idea of where it is, because we’ve seen the outer bounds.” Peter pointed to the Lethe. “So we know to track away from the river, and that will take us toward it—”

“If even that point exists! If it doesn’t, we just wander into infinity.”

“But just suppose it does. It would save us so much time!”

“The point isn’t to save time, Murdoch. The point is to find him. We can’t just randomly assume about his sins—”

“Why not?” Peter threw up his hands. “You think he’s too good for petty sins. You also won’t believe he’s done something really bad. So what, then, Law? What’s the Goldilocks mean of acceptable badness for dear Grimes? Where do you think he’s landed?”

Alice felt she was under attack, and for no good reason.

“I don’t know,” she said, and hated how small her voice was.

The question frightened her. She did not want to open those floodgates.

Behind lay a confused and guilty tangle she knew she could not sort out.

Memories strained, always threatening to burst—but she had done so well at keeping those gates closed, at redirecting her thoughts, finding her planks.

Better to keep it all locked away. Better to treat the whole matter purely as an experiment, and proceed methodically.

All outcomes were possible. No biases. “There’s no way we can know.

And that’s why we have to search in order. ”

Peter must have noticed her shrinking, for his expression softened. “I understand that, I’m just—I’m just afraid we’ll be walking forever.”

“The Shades must get around,” Alice reasoned.

“Yes, but they have an eternity to get around, so that doesn’t matter.”

“But we haven’t seen any on the path.”

“So?”

“If it’s a long distance to the next court, we should see them,” Alice reasoned. “If it’s a shorter distance, then they’re already inside. We haven’t seen anyone, so it’s more likely that they are already inside.”

Peter considered this. “That is valid.”

“Thank you.”

“Then we just keep walking?”

“I don’t see a better option,” said Alice. “Do you?”

So they fell back into line, trudging toward a building that was probably—but not certainly—getting larger.

Somehow it was not unpleasant, this endless stroll.

Alice was rather grateful for the reprieve.

They could have been a Victorian couple, sojourning to the seaside for fresh air.

The wash and lull of the Lethe was far preferable to the whining buzz of Pride, and if she closed her eyes Alice could imagine that wash sweeping over memories, sweeping them away, leaving a pure, clean slate behind.

She knew that wasn’t how it worked. Still she felt much calmer than she had over a long time; her head emptied of thought; her mind blissfully quiet. She felt that she could breathe.

Sometime around half past noon she heard the clicking.

Later she would come to dread the noise.

This warning that began always as a faint whisper, so faint you thought or hoped you’d imagined it, but intensified until it could not be ignored.

Later she would learn the whisper always turned into a clicking, until the sounds were disparate enough that the ear discerned it was not a single sound but a dozen constant clicks at once, echoing so you could not tell from which direction they came, and that by the time you could make out each one—vertebrae clacking, tibias and fibulas rubbing against their joints—it was too late.

“Do you hear that?” Alice stopped walking.

“Hear what?”

“It’s like—a snapping. Or clicking. Listen.”

“Might just be the river,” said Peter. “All sorts of stuff churning in there.”

“Right, maybe...”

Alice could not shake the sensation that something was wrong. Every now and then she thought she heard something behind her. A footstep, a brush of sand. Every time she turned around, however, she saw nothing. Only her neck kept prickling, now, with the conviction that something stalked behind her.

“Do you see something?” Peter asked after the third time she did this.

“I should like to,” said Alice. “Otherwise I’d really feel mad—oh!” She pointed upward of the bank. “There— look —”

Over the hill came a procession of three little animals.

Malformed, twisted-looking things, empty sockets somehow more expressive than the eyes that should have lain inside them.

Clicking and clacking they prodded around the sand, tails wagging, sniffing.

They could have been dogs or foxes or wolves; it was impossible to tell.

Alice thought, at first, they were just malnourished things—poor creatures wandered down the wrong tunnel and now trapped in Hell.

This happened sometimes, said the literature.

All boundaries were porous. Cats crossed them on purpose, other creatures by accident, and then they got lost, and then they died.

But as the things drew closer she saw there was no muscle on those creatures, no stretched sheet of skin.

No eyes, only hollow sockets. No flesh, only clean white bone, alabaster bright, held together by some force unseen.

“Remarkable,” Peter whispered. “Do you know what they are?”

“No, do you?”

“I’ve read about Cerberus.” Peter did not look nearly as frightened as she felt. “And the Buddhist guards, sometimes, can take the shape of dogs. But bones ... I don’t know. They’re kind of cute, don’t you think?”

“It’s chalk,” Alice exclaimed. “Look at their joints.”

Those bones were, indeed, bonded together by gleaming, powdery chalk.

Something or someone had stitched these bone creatures together by magick techniques too difficult to fathom—first because inscribing pentagrams on living things rather than a flat surface was still deemed impossible, and second because the inscriber, whoever they were, was not even present.

No Magician alive could induce such effects outside a pentagram.

The creatures were very close now. The largest one crept forth past its peers, head tilted to the side as if curious. There was no flesh of nose over that skeletal maw, but the front of its skull twitched right and left in a manner that resembled snuffling. Peter was right. It was strangely cute.

Peter stepped forward. “Do you think they’re friendly?”

“Don’t—” Alice began, but Peter was already kneeling, stretching out one hand at the leader.

“Hey there. Good boy—”

The bone-thing’s head snapped out. Peter yelped and jumped back, just as the bone-thing leapt for his face.

Peter’s arm swung up to ward it off, and the bone-thing’s jaws clamped around his wrist. No, only his sleeve, thank God—Peter waved his arm twice through the air and at last flung the bone-thing away.

It landed on its back, inches from the water.

For a second its limbs waved like cockroach legs, then it rolled over, skittered to its feet, and raced back up the slope to join its comrades.

A theory clicked together in Alice’s head. “They don’t like the water.” She shuffled to the shore, moving sideways so as not to turn her back on the creatures. “Murdoch—come on—”

He backtracked to her side. The bone-things did not follow.

Her hunch was right—the Lethe water ate memory, and chalk worked by recalling memory, the echoes of millions of years of life.

Indeed the closer they got to the water, the further back the bone-things fell.

They crouched, shoulders hunched in agitation, like coyotes debating whether to pounce. But they drew not an inch closer.

“Back.” Alice made a shooing motion with both hands, the kind one used on persistent gulls. “Back, back —”

The bone-things ignored her. Still an invisible boundary seemed to separate them from the water.

They could not come closer than ten or so yards from the Lethe, and indeed the more Alice inched toward the bank, the more agitated they grew.

They kneaded their paws against the sand, shaking their heads in distress.

Alice half-expected them to start yipping.

“Careful,” Peter warned.

Alice glanced over her shoulder. Her left heel had crept up to the water’s edge. She felt a wave of vertigo. Peter flung out his arm and she clutched it, bearing down against him for balance.

At last the bone-things had had enough. With a final clack of their jaws, they turned tail and scrambled back over the dunes.

“Are you all right?” Peter asked her.

“Fine. You?”

“Yeah, just a tiny scrape—Jesus.” He examined his sleeve.

It was torn clean away, up to the elbow.

Several angry red streaks ran up the length of his forearm.

The bone-thing’s teeth had been sharp. Alice winced to imagine what would have happened had its teeth sunk two inches further. “ Not a good boy.”

Alice squinted, following the creatures down the dune as far as she could. In seconds they were over the horizon, hidden from sight.

Not a single sojourner’s account made mention of creatures of bone and chalk. Nothing on the record came close.

Her tranquility cratered. The beach was no longer a fantastical and lulling retreat but an anxious and overexposed plane.

The sight of chalk meant the presence of another magician.

A frightfully talented one at that, one capable of techniques not even Professor Grimes had ever dared attempt.

Chalk meant a creator, another keen rational mind whose motives were unknown, save for one thing.

He was watching.