Page 49 of Katabasis

Alice squinted over the plain. Far beneath the cliffs she saw a crimson pulsing light, moving ponderously through the rocks. And within, a dark silhouette—but what form it took, man or beast, she could not tell.

“Is he dangerous?”

“Oh, very. Could smite you with a mere glance. He does leave these wonderful little embers wherever he steps, though. Coals that don’t go out for weeks.

That’s what I’m here for.” Elspeth nodded to her lamp—which, Alice noticed, burned a similar pulsing crimson.

Grunting, she hauled a metal bucket out from beneath the pile of oars.

“I’m off to collect. Can you two man the boat? ”

“Oh—sure.” Alice perked up. She had been puzzling over how to trap Elspeth under her watch, and here the opportunity had just dropped into their laps. “What should we—”

“Just stay by the anchor.” Elspeth was already climbing atop the railing. “And if the bone things approach, spritz them away. I do hate when they come aboard.”

One graceful leap, and she was ashore. Alice watched her dancing nimbly over the coals, jumping from rock to rock until she faded from sight.

She felt something against her back. She turned, then flinched. Peter stood very close behind her, eyes fixed ahead on Elspeth.

“Now’s the time,” he murmured. “Do you want to distract her? Or draw the pentagram?”

Those were the first words he’d spoken to her all morning. She tried to hide her relief. “Um—either, I guess. What do you—”

“I’m faster with pentagrams. I’ll draw it.”

Alice was not sure this was true but felt now was not the time to push back. “That’s fine. Where ought—I mean, where do you think we can get her?”

She had been struggling with this all morning.

Wrangling information out of Elspeth was one thing; the harder was getting her into a pentagram at all.

The problem with a blood-soaked pentagram was that it was very difficult to hide.

Theoretically the size of a pentagram did not affect its potency—and indeed, in Roman history the Celts had drawn great chalk structures around entire hills and forests to trap their enemies.

But it would take time, and more blood than they had.

“Just get her by the stove,” said Peter. “There’s a mat—we can draw it now, have it there before she’s back. You think there’s time?”

Alice glanced back onto the beach, where Elspeth was shoveling embers into her bucket with gusto. “You’ll have to be quick.”

“Sure. Can I get a knife?”

“Why—oh.” She fished it out of her rucksack. “Here—be careful.”

“I’ll do my best,” muttered Peter, and headed for the stairs.

Alice took a shaky breath and turned back to the beach. Elspeth’s bucket was nearly full. She saw Alice looking at her, straightened up, and waved cheerily. Alice waved back, feeling rotten.

Have resolve , she thought. Professor Grimes had taught her this.

The difference between greatness and mediocrity was only ever about following through.

Anyhow, this was a good thing, the merciful thing.

Elspeth had to be put out of her misery.

One conversation—that was all it would take.

And then they would be on their way, and Elspeth only ever an awkward memory.

“ Hello! Take this.” Standing tiptoe on the shore, Elspeth swung the bucket of embers forward using the far end of her spear. Alice grasped it and hauled it into the middle of the deck. From the corner of her eye she saw Peter disappear toward the stairs, his arm clamped against his side.

She straightened up. “Hey, Elspeth?”

“Yes, love.”

“Tell me if it’s presuming, but I was wondering if we might—that is, I’d love some tea.” She cleared her throat. “If you have any. It’s been so long.”

“Magicians.” Elspeth chuckled. “Incorrigible. Is Earl Grey all right? That’s all I have.”

“Earl Grey sounds perfect.”

“Come, I’ll show you how the stove works. Take those tongs, it’s out of coal—” Elspeth gestured, and Alice gingerly picked a glowing ember from the bucket.

Elspeth crouched before the stove. The mat sat firmly where Peter had left it.

It was a dirty, black-brown thing that might have once been yellow, synthetic fibers waterlogged and filled with sand.

Under the legs of the stove Alice spied faded cursive that read: Home is where the heart is .

She could imagine Elspeth finding it in the course of her scavenging, and carting it back delighted to her ship.

Hello, my lovely bones! Look what I’ve found.

“In here.” Elspeth waved for Alice to place the ember in the middle, then fished a stained, cracked teapot from the proofing drawer.

This she filled with Alice’s copied flask.

Driblets streamed out the cracks, sizzling pleasantly against the stove.

Together they stood over the flames, watching steam curl off the side of the teapot.

Archimedes materialized from wherever he’d been off to and perched by Elspeth’s legs near the stove, basking in the glow.

“Where’s Peter?” Elspeth asked.

“Oh—um, wanted to lie down, I guess.” Alice wondered if Peter had had time to activate the pentagram. She had not heard him speak on the deck—but pentagrams could be activated from a distance, especially if he were standing beneath them just now. She stalled. “I think he’s tired.”

“He’s a brooding type, isn’t he?”

“He can be, yeah.” Alice twisted her thumbs together, casting frantically about for how to proceed.

She had never been good at lying. Once Professor Grimes had sent her to Professor Stuart’s office to suss out whether he was pursuing the same strain of Curry subsets that Professor Grimes wanted to work on, and she had fumbled things so badly that ten minutes in, Professor Stuart began reminding her awkwardly but kindly that he had a wife and children.

But all academics, she knew, relished being asked about their research.

And it was not difficult to get Elspeth talking—after all, she had languished so long without anyone to listen.

“So who’s on Wrath, anyways?” She mustered the most casual tone she could. “Lab managers and registrars?”

“Nothing good. I don’t see a lot of folks go through Wrath, to be honest. And the ones that do, I hear more than see them.” Elspeth shook their head. “Dreadful place. I don’t ever go much further than the shore.”

“Do you understand the purpose of the courts?” Alice pressed. “We’ve been confused ourselves. It seems—it seems, at the end of the day, that punishments are entirely random.”

“What’s so random about it?”

“Well, I can’t tell what the point of anything is,” said Alice. “Pride and Desire, maybe. You get over yourself and then you walk out. But Greed? What are they doing there? What’s it all for ?”

“Hell if I know. You stop asking questions, after a while.”

“But it’s so vexing ,” said Alice. “All these scholars have these theories—about sin, karma, repentance—and then you come to Hell and realize it’s all up to the whims of deities. And I just think if any Tartarologists really came down here they’d burn their previous publications.”

“That’s because they would like to treat the Afterlife like a game,” said Elspeth.

“All academia is shoving natural phenomena into boxes that won’t fit.

They’d like to program it out because it makes them feel safe, because if they can point to all the sinners in Greed and Wrath and Tyranny and say Well at least I wasn’t as bad as him , then they don’t have much to worry about.

And they get frustrated when Hell won’t play along. ”

“But there should be some order,” said Alice. “It should be fair .”

“You want Hell to obey the rules of classical logic.”

“Not logic, necessarily,” said Alice. “I know there’s elements to the divine, and all that. But the cosmos should have some coherence, don’t you think?”

“You are such an incorrigible member of the Cambridge School,” said Elspeth. “All systems builders. Closed circuits. Bah. Never open to spontaneity.”

“I only like knowing what awaits,” said Alice. “That’s all.”

“Here, this might make you feel better. Do you want to hear my theory?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Well, I think the biggest misconception about Buddhism is that karma functions as this grand tally that you count up at the end of the day.” Elspeth waved a hand.

“But it’s not like you get five hundred good points and eight hundred bad points, so that in Hell you have to account for a net three hundred deficit.

It’s nowhere so neat. Karma is more like—hm.

You might say karma is like a seed. Seeds grow into fruit.

Karma is a natural consequence. Badness accrues.

It affects the way you live your life, how you perceive the world.

When you do evil things, you see the world as petty and selfish and cruel.

And what you experience in Hell is just the final ripple effect of your original evil.

You get precisely what you asked for. And I think the whole point of Hell is to show you the full extent of what you wanted. ”

“Huh.” Alice turned this over in her mind. This theory was appealing, she thought, but there was still so much it couldn’t explain. “And the Shades in Greed—that’s what they wanted all along? Building spears on the beach?”

“What they wanted was to be better than everyone else,” said Elspeth.

“And now they’ve got the chance to prove it.

They get to go wrestling in the muck. Proving their might and vanquishing weaker minds.

Every single day. They’re probably in paradise.

The upshot is, Hell’s not so bad for the people who are in it.

They’re exactly where they wanted to be. ”

The kettle began to whistle. Elspeth took it off the stove, tipped water carefully into two teacups, and handed one to Alice. “Here you are.”