Page 83 of Katabasis
A lice was no wartime magician, but all the military histories she’d ever read made a big deal about finding the high ground.
So she tracked first to the river, and then she found a spot on a bluff where she could see the Kripkes coming from all directions.
This bluff stretched into jagged overhangs that loomed above Lethe, and so she formulated a plan: to lure the Kripkes to the top and find some way of tricking them over the edge.
The drop was not far, but she didn’t need the fall to kill. She only needed to get them wet.
Then she roved the surrounding hills with a bucket of cat’s blood, dipping and drawing pentagrams on every spare inch of sand she could find.
This work was quite calming. It gave her somewhere to focus her chalk-screaming mind.
Always it was so lovely to have a well-defined objective and clear parameters for success.
In her college years Alice had participated in several Magick Olympiads, in which contestants were given half an hour to inscribe pentagrams to accomplish a series of tasks.
Make the bowling ball rise to the ceiling.
Move this pin from one end of a field to the next.
She’d racked up a half dozen medals for her talent in inscribing quickly and accurately under pressure.
The old thrill of competition came back to her now.
Forget the Kripkes for a moment, forget the likelihood of impending death, and win the game at hand.
Here is a board, and here is your objective: to obstruct your opponents more than they obstruct you.
She pulled out the standard repertoire. At intervals across the field she inscribed all of Zeno’s paradoxes of motion: Achilles and the tortoise, Atalanta on the racetrack, the arrow in flight.
If Atalanta wished to cross a racetrack—if the bone-things wished to cross the field to the bluff—she had to first get halfway there, and then halfway to halfway there, and then halfway to halfway to halfway there.
But if you kept dividing the distances by half, then Atalanta had to accomplish an infinite number of tasks, and so she probably couldn’t budge at all.
And if the bone-things wished to even move—if they, like an arrow, wished to traverse space from point A to point B—they must grapple with the fact that at any given moment in time, if you took a freeze frame of their movements, they would be standing still.
The time it would take them to reach Alice was composed of such given moments, but that meant they were always standing still, and never moving.
And they could never harm Alice if they could not move.
This was all silly stuff, as long as you had beginner calculus. But the bone-things did not have calculus.
Where the ground sloped toward the hill, Alice wrote out an expanded version of the Liar Paradox. This was a practical joke within the department that often had undergraduates stepping back and forth on the stairways, stuck like rocking horses:
THE NEXT STATEMENT IS FALSE
THE PRECEDING STATEMENT IS TRUE
At the top of the mound, right against the ledge, she drew from memory a most special paradox.
She had no clue whether this one would work, but she didn’t strictly need it to work.
She only needed to show Nick and Magnolia something they’d never seen before.
Something interesting enough to give them pause.
“You seem very prepared.” Gradus had been drifting at her heels as she worked, murmuring in appreciation all the while.
“You could help me fight them,” said Alice.
“What, and huff and puff until they all blow down?” Gradus blurred himself all over, as if to emphasize his insubstantiality. “I’m only a Shade, remember.”
“I’m sure you’re good for lots of things,” said Alice. “You could distract them, for instance. You could swoop and billow and yell very loudly.”
But she could tell she had overestimated the strength of their bond. Gradus was fond of her only when it was amusing to be. And while she considered their time together very special, she was only a fraction of his deep time. In one thousand years he would likely only chuckle at her name.
“Ah... well.” Gradus made the sound of a throat clearing.
She thought Gradus might say something more.
For a moment it really did seem like he was considering it.
But it was so much less awkward not to. Goodbyes were worth the effort only when you meant to see someone again.
Gradus merely dissolved where he stood, solid grays fading to a shadow.
There was a slight breeze, then he was gone.
And Alice might have felt abandoned, but she thought about it for a moment, and then concluded she didn’t have any real grounds to be upset.
Humming, she returned to her work.
She checked all her pentagrams, made sure all the circles were closed.
She sprinkled sand across her handiwork, enough to hide it from a casual glance, not enough to interfere with the pentagrams’ range.
She stood back, surveyed the now-smooth terrain, and nodded in satisfaction.
She had laid a very good chessboard. It was the best anyone could do with a cat carcass and waterlogged chalk.
Then she retreated up the hill and watched for the bone army’s coming.
The wait was interminable.
Alice was filled with bloodlust and chalk dust, with nowhere yet to put them.
She was long past the point of fear. She felt she was on a speeding train, fast approaching the crash, and she hated to feel the minutes pass because it was all putting off the end.
Several times she thought or hoped she heard clicking, but they were only memories become too vivid.
Each time she shook her head, like a dog shaking off water, and the clicking ceased.
At last she saw that roving line of white. No Kripkes in sight. Just a menagerie of reconstructed bones; dogs and cats and what looked like a small cavalry of raccoons.
This was a much larger horde than had attacked her and Peter outside Greed.
She wondered if the Kripkes knew she was something special, if they had assembled all their best forces specially for her.
They drew closer, covering the distance with astonishing speed.
She counted under her breath. Thirty white horses upon a red hill , she thought.
First they champ. Then they stamp. The bone-things reached the base of the hill. And now they stand still.
She squeezed tight the hilt of her knife.
For a moment she was ready to fight the horde whole.
She had forgotten that her spells did indeed work, and she was quite a good magician, until she saw the evidence.
She had been right. The bone-things could not do calculus, and could not tell Zeno from God.
A third of the horde slowed, and slowed again, and slowed down infinitely until their spindly little legs beat pointlessly into degrees of diminishing fractions.
Only a lucky few skirted round the piles of their incapacitated friends, and when they got up the hill this number was whittled to a mere handful.
The bravest among them approached her sniffing, cautious now. It had the slender, trembling build of a whippet.
“Stop it,” she told it sternly. “Go. Sit.”
The bone-thing yipped and sprang.
Alice smashed her blade against its side. It fell, and before it could get up Alice slammed the knife down again and again until its ribs cracked open and its limbs splayed at its sides.
Alice rose. “Anyone else?”
They all sprang at once.
But they were so slow ! Alice could not believe how easy this was.
Snorting chalk had done something to her vision, had altered her perception of time and space.
Her sight broadened and sharpened both at once.
She could see every little bit of them, all the chalk that animated their joints, every stroke of the Kripkes’ meticulous handwriting.
And she knew precisely where to hit them, so that the rest would fall apart.
She knew when they would spring, where they were aiming, and where they would be. She knew to get there first.
Thwack. Thwack. She wielded a blade in her right arm and a flask in her left, sprinkling the air like a priest sprinkles holy water. The water dissolved their joints, and her knife did the rest, and a pile of bones began building up around her ankles as she danced.
God, what couldn’t she do? It was exactly that manic feeling she got when she’d drunk five cups of coffee and felt suddenly confident that she could master any field if she put her mind to it—that very brief high always followed by a dreadful crash.
Only here the crash never came, and with each movement, as Alice’s blood pumped hotter, the world grew slower and slower until she had the frightening sensation that her mind might race right out of her body.
But sanity held, and her mind and body did not come apart.
She hung there at the brink of transcendence, when all the world stood still and its fault lines pulsed visible.
She had a flashback to those late nights in the lab, every time she’d blinked and seen the hidden world—and now it was all laid out in front of her, not in abstract, but in terrible concreteness. Just bones to shatter. Spines to break.