Page 51 of Katabasis

R ight.” Peter hoisted his rucksack over his shoulder and turned to trudge up the shore. “Good luck to you.”

Alice scrambled to her feet. “Where are you going?”

He did not reply. She watched him for a moment, baffled, and then hastened up the shore behind him. “What are you doing?”

Still he did not reply. She seized his sleeve. “ Murdoch! ”

“Let go.”

“Tell me where you’re going.”

“Why?” He wrenched his arm away with such vehemence that she stumbled back. “You’re not coming with me.”

“We can’t split up, it’s not safe.”

He barked out a laugh. “ Safe , she says. Safe , says the girl who would have damned me to the Weaver Girl.”

“I didn’t — ”

“That was wrong, what we did. Elspeth was right to cast us out.” He turned away from her and kept trudging. “I’m finished.”

“Murdoch.” She followed behind him, pathetic—but she didn’t know where else to go. “Please don’t hate me.”

He laughed again. This time there was a desperate quality to it; the sort of laugh that was seconds from a sob. “I don’t, Law. But I’m quite sure that you hate me .”

“I don’t hate you.”

“Then you must think very little of me,” he said. “Because ever since we got here, I’ve only felt—I don’t know, this coldness , like you don’t even care I’m here.”

“I never asked you to come,” she said. “I would have gone alone, you’re the one who wanted to come with—”

“Because I thought we’d be better off together.”

“Or because you wanted a sacrifice for exchange, isn’t that right?”

“I told you, that’s not what I had planned—”

“Well, that’s rich,” she said. “Seeing as you had my name underlined thrice in your notes.”

Peter spun around. The fury in his eyes made her flinch; she had never before seen Peter so angry. “I don’t have to justify myself to you,” he said. “But if you think I’m that kind of person, Law, then you’re better off continuing through Hell on your own.”

He continued up the slope. Alice stared after him for a moment, then followed. She didn’t have a plan; she only knew she had nowhere else to go, and if she lost Murdoch, she was lost altogether.

Her foot stuck. She teetered, nearly lost her balance. She wrenched her foot free—then bent down to take a look, for the sand seemed wet, but that didn’t make any sense, for they were getting further from shore.

Up ahead, Peter was bent over his ankle.

“Murdoch!”

He didn’t respond. She started toward him—but suddenly, her legs would not move. She tried, but something rooted them in place, and when she glanced down, she saw a hand. Alice screamed.

Dead arms burst out of the water. Alice jumped away, but her feet splashed into a deep recess, and she lurched to the side. She saw then they were not on solid ground at all—what seemed like muddy ground was sand sticking to the surface of water, whole stretches of water, lurking in wait.

A force yanked against her knee. She collapsed sideways into the bog.

She felt a shock of icy water. She opened her eyes.

She wished she hadn’t. For she saw then an entire lake full of Shades, biting and twisting and pulling against one another.

Their faces were horrible, their eyes blazing red, their mouths stretched wide with fury.

She could not see where it ended. They seemed to go on and on forever, a bottomless descent of stifled fury, stretching all the way down into the lightless dark.

Sullen in black mire , Dante had reported. They gurgle in their gullets.

She kicked. Her foot connected against something solid, something that gave her leverage.

The weight around her leg vanished. She swam up, broke the surface.

She flailed about, seeking purchase. There—her hands scrabbled against hard stone.

She pressed her fingers down, hauled herself up.

She crouched against her perch, trembling—then saw, just beyond, what seemed like a stretch of rock sticking out from the water.

She shrugged off her rucksack and threw it forward.

It did not sink. Alice crawled on all fours toward the stretch.

The bog was silent behind her. All she could see was bubbles.

“Murdoch?” Her voice was a tinny choke. She spat water out into the bog and tried again. “ Murdoch? ”

A hoarse gasp. Peter broke the surface several feet away. A tangle of Shades rose with him—fingers clawing against his face, his eyes, his shoulders, trying to drag him back down. Alice crouched on her knees, panicked—he was too far to reach, and her hunting knives could do nothing from here.

She yanked out her Perpetual Flask. Bog water was not Lethe water, she reasoned.

These Shades, furious as they were, might be afraid of oblivion yet.

She could not aim—there was no aiming anyway, for Peter was enveloped now in a frothing mass of dead souls.

She could only fling out black water in a shaking arc.

Droplets sailed through the air and landed on the bog with a sharp sizzle, like water hitting a burning pan.

The Shades fell away. Peter splashed through the bog toward her. Three strides, two strides—he stopped, dragged under, then popped up again. A Shade hung off his rucksack, teeth sunk into the upper pocket.

“Take it off!” she shouted. Peter wriggled between the straps, freed one shoulder and then the other. The Shade sank back into the bog with a plop . Peter lurched forward, hands splayed at Alice. She grasped his arms and pulled him up.

Together they huddled, pressed as close as they could against one another, unable to do anything but breathe.

“The ridge,” she whispered. She could see the narrowest strip of land—and beyond that, a ridge of rock above the bog. Stable land. “Can you make it?”

Peter nodded.

She stood and tiptoed forward. She nearly fell; Peter steadied her.

“Thanks,” she gasped, but he did not let her go. His fingers closed round her arm, viselike, and stayed there the entire time that, step by step, they made their way through Wrath.

The ridge widened into a thicker strip of rock, just large enough for a human body to lie on with hands spread out. One by one they stumbled up the edge and collapsed. Alice rolled onto her stomach and lay there for a long while.

“We have to go back,” said Peter.

She sat up. “Go back where?”

“The Fields of Asphodel. Over the wall.”

“Are you mad? The wall is gone —”

“We’ll beg. We’ll find the guardians, we’ll tell them we’re alive, we’ll plead to be let back up—”

“What— why ?”

“Look at us.” He flung up his arms. “My pack’s gone.

Whatever’s in your pack is all waterlogged.

Who knows how much of the chalk still works.

Without food or water we have three days, if that.

And how are we going to spend it, Law? Chasing down something we don’t know exists, or finding our way back home? ”

“But then we’ll have wasted—”

“It’s wasted. It’s already wasted. But please, Alice.” Peter’s voice cracked. “I don’t want to die.”

“We could die anyways,” said Alice. “There’s no—I mean, we took the boat... I don’t even know how we’d get back to the wall, or the fields—”

“Then we find any deity along the way and beg,” said Peter. “We might even beg the Weaver Girl, she might take pity—”

“Or she’d trap us here forever! There’s no guarantee—”

“But the odds are still better than if we forge on ahead, don’t you think? At least the lower courts are predictable. We have no idea what we’ll find up ahead.”

“But we’ve already come this far.”

“You know,” Peter said, “the sunk cost fallacy is one of the most common failures of everyday logic.”

“Oh, fuck off, Murdoch—”

“Which is remarkable, since everyone knows what it is , they just won’t let it guide their reasoning.”

“Bugger the sunk cost fallacy,” said Alice, committing it all the same. “We’ve given up too much, Murdoch. Half our lifetimes.”

“Half is better than none.”

“But think of what they’ll say . The idiotic venture of Murdoch and Law. Went to Hell, and have nothing to show for it except mild amnesia.”

“At least we’ll be back ,” said Peter. “I think I could put up with any amount of laughing if I were alive, don’t you?”

“Sure,” said Alice. “Fine. Then I don’t suppose you know a way back over that bog.”

They stood silent for a moment, staring over the hilltop.

From this vantage point it did seem impossible to find a way back to where they’d come from.

The bog stood between them and the shoreline, and there was no clear path through the mountains that ringed Wrath on all sides.

Elspeth had brought them over Greed by boat; it was unclear where the path through led.

The only stable patch in sight was the ground they were standing on, and this led deeper into Wrath.

“Let us go as far as Tyranny,” Alice proposed. “If we don’t stop to sleep, then we can cross two courts in one day. And the chances are better than not that we’ll find Professor Grimes there.”

“That still doesn’t solve the problem of how we’ll get back.”

“But then at least we’ll have the three of us, won’t we?” Alice forced her voice to brighten. “I’m sure he’ll be able to think of something, he’s probably got all sorts of tricks we don’t know about—”

Something shifted in Peter’s face, but it passed just as soon as she noticed.

“Fine.” His voice was carefully level. “I’ll carry the pack.”

Her fingers closed reflexively around her straps. “It’s my pack.”

“I mean only that it’s heavy,” said Peter. “We can take turns.”

She hesitated, and then shrugged it off and handed it over. Peter strapped it on, stretched his arms out, and without another word began to plod forward.

Alice could just make out a path through the bog ahead; a winding line thin as a pencil tracing. It trickled up through a dip between the distant peaks, beyond which all she could see was thunder.