Page 28 of Katabasis

And maybe they were Grimes’s foot soldiers, infantrymen of a dying order.

He certainly made them feel that way. Magic was out of favor, he liked to tell them, one of the signs of a decadent civilization.

He went on this rant so often they knew it by heart.

Men used to be giants, and with every next generation the decline grew.

Aristotle invented logic, Euclid geometry, Kant systematic reason.

The gains of thought after were marginal.

No one invented whole systems anymore; they could only fiddle with what came before, if they could even grasp the ancients well enough to fiddle.

Their generation was the most decadent and stupid of all.

Grimes’s generation were at least war magicians; they had pushed the field forward by leaps and bounds in its practical applications.

But Alice and Peter’s cohort quibbled over philosophical details.

They made flashy gadgets for toy companies.

The best among them sought residencies in Vegas; the worst among them became consultants.

No doubt, magic was on the decline. And this was merely a symptom of a world where children did not read but sat drooling before a screen; where artists splattered paint at random and thought themselves Michelangelo’s equal.

Theirs was not a world of learned men; it had no attention for sustained inquiry; the people of their age only wanted tabloids, gossip, entertainment.

Civilizational collapse, impending apocalypse—they forgot the greatness of their forefathers, they were trapped in pointless little debates; they could not get out, no one knew how to think anymore.

At this point in the rant he was always drunk on wine, and more powerful for it; and they were rapt, guilty as accused, desperate to prove him wrong.

How could they become giants? It would take genius, he told them; immense effort; a monastic dedication to rise above the detritus of their addled world and see clearly above the clouds.

Could they do it? Could they restore the valor of the old, could they keep the faith?

They promised him that they would.

The point was that Professor Grimes hadn’t tormented just anyone. He’d tormented them . Because they were strong enough to withstand it. Because they kept the faith. Because they were special, and worth the effort, and because whatever they became when he was done with them would be so dazzling.

Perversely, it made her glad that Professor Grimes had been just as insane with Peter. It made her feel less... wrong. This was evidence, at least, that she wasn’t the only one Professor Grimes did this to. And she wasn’t the only one who found it worth it to say yes.

And really, this was the challenge in anticipating which court of Hell Professor Grimes had been sentenced to. For all his crimes, there was a part of Alice that was deeply convinced he’d never done anything wrong. Only what was good for her, what any student needed from a teacher.

“You should get some sleep.” Peter pulled a thick paperback out of his rucksack and shuffled until his back rested against the wall. He drew his knees up, then rested his elbows atop them. “I’ll keep watch.”

“You sure?”

“Oh, yeah. I brought Tolkien for company.”

“Give me two hours, then. Wake me up and we can trade.” Alice pulled the blanket over her shoulders and settled down. She felt very loose and empty then; not only from exhaustion, but also from relief. She felt a great weight had been lifted from her shoulders. She felt she no longer had to hide.

Thank you , she wanted to tell Peter. For listening. But her eyelids were like weights, and she couldn’t more than think the words before she fell into the dark.

“ All quiet on the western front.” Peter shook her awake. “Mind if I take a turn?”

“Go on,” she yawned, and smiled as he pulled as much of the blanket over him as he could.

“It’s my feet or my chest,” he said. “I have to choose. Which do you think?”

“Probably protect your feet. You never know what’s going to come up and nibble those toes.”

“You wouldn’t defend me?”

“Your legs are so long.” She smiled. “I wouldn’t see them coming.”

She pulled out a book of her own—it was Proust’s turn at last—and Peter curled onto his side.

Moments later his breathing deepened, and his mouth went slack, and he curled in on himself in a way Alice couldn’t help but find endearing.

He was all angles, Peter. Long floppy limbs knotted together in an absurd, unbalanced mess.

Peter looked so funny when he was asleep: eyebrows furrowed, mouth downturned as if he were clinging to slumber with resentful concentration.

His eyelashes were very long. Alice had always marveled at Peter’s lashes.

She had never seen such long lashes on a boy.

They made her want to run her knuckle against their tips, just to feel their brush—so soft, she imagined, like butterfly wings.

What went on in that head of his? She felt a pang in her chest then; the ache of an old, tantalizing, unsolved problem.

She had never been able to figure him out.

She knew better than to think they’d made some great breakthrough this evening, that they were now the best of friends.

Peter had a talent for making you feel like this, like he was the only one in the world who understood you, and you him.

Like you two existed on a plane of your own.

Then the next morning he would act like a complete stranger.

As if you had never spoken at all. She had been through this whiplash many times before. She knew better by now.

Still she felt very close to him at that moment—if not for the secrets they’d disclosed, then at least for the simple fact that she had not spoken like this to him, honest and unguarded, in so very long.

A hot flush rose to her cheeks. It was certainly the effect of Hell, its endless dunes and terrors and all its attendant deprivations, and the fact that Peter Murdoch was the only being in the entire realm who wasn’t insubstantial as breath.

Still she could not rid herself of the fancy to lean down and put her palm against his cheek.

This horrified her. She blinked and cast her eyes about, searching for literally anything else to do.

Anything to stare at other than Peter’s face, his splayed and ridiculous form.

He had a habit of casting one arm above his head as he slept like Christ in a painting; chin upturned, awaiting salvation.

Lord. What an accident of nature. Astonishing that human beings had evolved over millennia, just to end up like Peter Murdoch.

A packet of notes peeked out from his bag. She glanced at the top and snorted. It was just like Peter to keep his notes in an unbound, unorganized bundle of loose papers.

Curious, she tugged them out. She’d always enjoyed reading Peter’s work; it was fun to see where his thoughts matched with or diverged from hers.

The first two pages were sketches of pentagrams—four failed ways to get to Hell, and one that succeeded.

She recognized those theorems; she’d spent weeks puzzling through them herself.

She felt the thrill of the familiar as she traced his work, as she glimpsed at what stage and how he’d solved the same riddles she had.

Peter’s process was, of course, brilliant.

Several of his solutions were far more elegant than hers, and at one stage he’d bypassed a thorny formula she’d struggled with by apparently intuiting the solution.

In the end, he’d settled on the same method she had—Ramanujan’s Summation, with Setiya’s Modifications.

No wonder he’d realized immediately what she was up to. All their work was the same.

The last several pages were pure logic. She almost flipped past them—she hated logic and was only passingly fluent because taking Fundamentals of Logic had been a degree requirement—but something about the final page made her stop.

He’d circled and underlined the last formulas several times over. It was so unlike the rest of his handwriting—hurried, scrawled, most of it barely legible—that these conclusions must have been of great importance.

She flipped back up to the previous page and read the derivations again, taking care this time to decipher it all as best she could.

The endeavor hurt her head—she’d taken logic before her tattoo, and she barely remembered what half the symbols were—but at last the scribblings solidified into a certain shape.

It was a spell for organic exchange.

Her hands went sticky with a sudden, cold sweat. She rubbed them hastily against her shirt, glancing backward at Peter. He hadn’t stirred—which shocked her, for her heart seemed then to beat so loudly it was deafening.

When had he come up with this?

She’d seen these proofs before. She’d herself chased down equations for living exchange into the most obscure corners of the library, from alchemical scribblings of Samarkand to Wittgenstein’s lost notebooks (not lost, it turned out, only hidden in a special room in the faculty library and under constant lock and key).

She’d given up on exchange after a week of searching because it seemed so clearly like a dead end, and all the references kept turning up lost, destroyed, or misplaced.

She should have realized someone else had gotten to them first.

Here, right before her, was the final piece of the puzzle that she’d never been able to solve.

Professor Grimes’s name on the left. And at the bottom of the page, under the right side of the equation, the thing that had first caught her eye: her own name, written in clear, bold letters. Then underlined twice. Then punctuated with three question marks.

That was undoubtedly Peter’s handwriting.

She’d seen him etch her name so many times before.

On labels. On stacks of papers meant for her to grade.

In the corner of the chalkboard, on little jokes meant for her.

Dear Alice. Ha ha. Always the same spidery letters, always fully capitalized; always the c looping into the e .

You could not perform organic exchange on yourself.

This was an inviolable axiom of magick. The pentagram required the sustained consciousness of its user to take effect.

You needed a human mind present, willing to believe in the logical contradiction.

No pentagram that deliberately destroyed the magician would take effect.

You could only rend yourself apart by accident.

You could not, in effect, use magick to kill yourself. Alice knew this to be true. She had looked into the matter, as it were. You could use pentagrams to eviscerate a soul, but you had to do it to someone else.

If Alice.

She clamped a palm over her mouth, so Peter would not hear her panicked whine.

There was only one possible interpretation for what she was looking at.

Peter intended to trade her soul for Professor Grimes’s.

Peter was going to trap her here in Hell.