Page 2 of Katabasis

“Of course.” Alice wouldn’t forget Cleary’s Templates . She didn’t forget anything.

“Have you cross-checked all twelve authoritative versions of Orpheus’s journey?”

“Of course I did Orpheus, it’s the obvious place to start—”

“Do you know how to cross the Lethe?”

“Please, Murdoch.”

“Do you know how to tame Cerberus?”

Alice hesitated. She knew this was a possible obstruction—she’d seen the threat of Cerberus mentioned in a letter from Dante to Bernardo Canaccio, only she hadn’t seen it referenced in any other materials she found, and the one book that might have contained a clue—Vandick’s Dante and the Literal Inferno —was already missing from the stacks.

In fact, quite a few books she needed had kept disappearing from the library these past few months, often checked out on the very morning she’d gone in.

Every translation of the Aeneid . All the medieval scholarship on Lazarus.

It was like some poltergeist haunted the stacks, anticipating her project’s every turn.

Realization dawned. “You’ve—”

“Been researching the same thing,” said Peter. “We’re too far into these degrees, Alice. No one else could supervise our dissertations. No one else is clever enough. And there’s still so much he hasn’t taught us. We have to bring him back. And two minds are better than one here.”

Alice had to laugh. All this time. Every empty slot on the shelves, every missing puzzle piece. It was Peter all along.

“Tell me how to tame Cerberus, then.”

“Nice try, Law.” Lightly, Peter punched her shoulder. “Come on. You know we’re always better together.”

Now this, Alice thought, was really laying it on thick.

He didn’t mean it. She knew he didn’t mean it because it was not true.

It had not been true in well over a year, and that had been entirely Peter’s choice.

She recalled it well. So how could he act so chummy, toss those words out so casually, as if they were still first-years giggling in the lab, as if time had never passed?

But then, this was Peter’s modus operandi. He was like this with everyone. All warmth and cheer—but the moment you tried to step closer, solid ground gave way to empty space.

Two bad options, then. Imperfect knowledge, or Peter. She supposed she could demand the relevant books—Peter was annoying, but he didn’t hoard resources—and figure it all out on her own. But her funding clock was ticking, and certain body parts were rotting in a basement. There simply wasn’t time.

“Fine,” she said. “I hope you brought your own chalk.”

“Two new packs of Shropley’s,” he said happily.

Yes, she knew he preferred Shropley’s. Evidence of bad character. At least she wouldn’t have to share.

She arranged her rucksack next to her feet, checking that none of the straps lay outside the pentagram. “Then all that’s left is the incantation. Are you ready?”

“Hold on,” said Peter. “You do know the price?”

Of course Alice knew. This was why scholars rarely ever went to Hell. It wasn’t that getting there was so very hard . You only had to dig up all the right proofs and master them. It was that a trip down below rarely justified the price.

“Half my remaining lifespan,” she said. Entering Hell meant crashing through borders between worlds, and this demanded a kind of organic energy that mere chalk could not contain. “Thirty years or so, gone. I know.”

But she had hardly struggled with the choice.

Would she rather graduate, produce brilliant research, and go out in a blaze of glory?

Or would she rather live out her natural lifespan, gray haired and drooling, fading into irrelevance, consumed by regret?

Had not Achilles chosen to die in battle?

She had met professors emeriti at department receptions, those poor aphasic props, and she did not think old age an attractive prospect.

She knew this choice would horrify anyone outside the academy.

But no one outside the academy could possibly understand.

She would sacrifice her firstborn for a professorial post. She would sever a limb.

She would give anything, so long as she still had her mind, so long as she could still think.

“I want to be a magician,” she said. “It’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

“I know,” said Peter. “Me too. And I—I need to do this. I must.”

A taut silence. Alice considered asking, but she knew Peter would not tell her. Peter, when it came to the personal, was a stone wall. How easily he vanished behind a placid smile.

“That’s settled, then.” Peter cleared his throat. “So maybe I’ll do the Latin, and you’ll do the Greek and Chinese.” He peered down at a segment near his right toe. “Say, why isn’t this in Sanskrit?”

“I’m not comfortable with Sanskrit,” Alice said, peeved. This was just like Peter. Condescending, even when ostensibly just asking for clarification. “I’ve done all the Buddhist sutra references in Classical Chinese instead.”

“Oh.” Peter hummed. “Well, that probably works. If you’re sure.”

She rolled her eyes. “In three, on go.”

“Right on.”

She counted down. “Go.”

And they began their chant.

The dreadful, tragic death of Professor Jacob Grimes had been both foreseeable and avoidable. It was also, unknown to most, entirely Alice’s fault.

That day’s exercise was nothing more risky nor radical than the thousands of routine experiments Professor Grimes had conducted in that laboratory space for decades.

He was only retracing some basic principles of set theory cited in a new article he had coming out in Arcana , the top journal in their field.

It was all utterly routine, and no more dangerous than riding a bike, so long as one double-checked their pentagrams. Undergraduate-level stuff.

Professor Grimes did not double-check his pentagrams. He’d long reached the stage of his career where one left that sort of grunt work to graduate students.

Professor Grimes’s days were devoted to profound, deep thinking .

He saw above the mountains and clouds to discern the truth, and then he descended to utter pronouncements like Moses coming down Mount Sinai, and then his underlings hammered out the details.

He never did his own arithmetic or translations anymore.

And he was far above kneeling over tracing lines of chalk, straining his eyes, straining his back.

One might find it reckless, foolish even, for a magician to leave his life in the hands of underpaid and overworked graduate students.

But for one thing, Professor Grimes’s graduate students were the best in the world.

For another, even graduate students at bottom-rate American institutions could identify the most dangerous mistakes in a pentagram.

And this was Cambridge. After so many years of practice they stood out to any competent scholar like glaring red flags: gaps in the outer circles, misspelled words, false equivalencies, parentheses left unclosed.

Anyone in a sound state of mind could have done it.

But Alice was not in a sound state of mind that day.

She was of course underpaid and overworked, but this condition was common among graduate students and no one cared much about it.

But she had also not slept properly in three months.

She’d drunk so much caffeine that the world shimmered, and her chalk trembled in her grip.

She felt, as she often did, that her body had no defined boundaries from the material world; that if she stopped holding herself together as a subject, she would dissolve like a sugar cube in tea.

She was in no state to work, and she had not been for a very long time.

What Alice needed most then was a nice long holiday, and then perhaps institutionalization at some remote facility near the sea.

But missing lab was not an option. Professor Grimes had not asked her to assist on a paper since last year, and though the work was beneath her, and though coauthorship was out of the question, Alice was desperate to get back in his good graces.

Anyhow, tired to the point of collapse was a default state.

The expectation was simply that, through some combination of strong coffee and Lembas Bread, one pushed through until all deadlines were met and one could collapse into an indefinite coma without consequence.

Alice had spent most of graduate school in this state, and it was not so bad.

But she was also angry that afternoon, and resentful, and confused, and such a turbid mess of frustration and fury that the very sound of Professor Grimes’s voice made her flinch.

Perceiving his sheer physical proximity—sensing him move, kneeling in his shadow—made it hard to breathe.

In the brief moments that their eyes met, her breath stopped, and she thought she might like to die.

It was very difficult to concentrate in such an environment.

So, when she drew the pentagrams, she did not close the requisite loops.

With pentagrams, it was very important to close the requisite loops.

Uttering incantations invoked the living-dead energy of chalk dust, and all that energy had an explosive effect unless contained properly within a defined space.

Even the smallest hole could cause disaster.

In fact, smaller holes were worse , as they concentrated all the energy to terrible effect.

Therefore anyone who drew a pentagram performed what was known as the Ant Test: tracing a pencil tip from one point of the inscription all the way around to make sure any ant following the line would complete the journey.

Alice did not perform the Ant Test.

She did not, in effect, bother to ensure Professor Grimes’s body remained intact.