Page 9 of Katabasis

D own-climbing was harder than going up.

For one thing you couldn’t see your next foothold and just had to assume that if you shimmied down, then your toes would find something to latch on to. And climbing down was no easier on tired arms, for one expended just as much energy making sure that the downward momentum didn’t take you too far.

But Peter fared better this time around. It helped, psychologically, that they were shrinking rather than growing the distance from the ground. It helped also that, halfway to the bottom, he shrugged off his rucksack and let it thump to the ground. “Just books,” he panted. “They’ll survive.”

He tumbled the last meter but landed all in one piece. Alice jumped down beside him and landed sprightly on her feet. This hurt her heels, but she had a silly urge to impress Peter. People in the climbing club were always impressing each other by landing like cats. Sadly, he did not notice.

Hell, on this side of the wall, appeared as a flat, empty field—no Shades, no paths, no shape on the horizon that indicated any place or thing.

Gone was that rolling plain. They were stuck again in endless desert, with no clear destination.

Alice felt a dull panic at this sight, for they had nothing to show for a whole day’s effort, and she hated to ever pause her work without an idea of where to pick up next.

But their limbs were jelly, and their brains complete fuzz, and they agreed between them to leave this puzzle for tomorrow.

They made camp in the shadow of the wall.

The literature had been split on whether day and night existed in Hell—the more dramatic accounts claimed endless night—but it turned out that the too-dim sun did eventually set, and the air did chill, and about half past six Cambridge time (Alice’s watch still worked) everything turned pitch-black.

It seemed Hell had no moon, or if it did, she was hiding.

They sat alone in the solid dark, and their only comfort was the silence—for if anything lurked beyond, at least they didn’t know.

Alice made a small fire with matches and starter kindling. Peter parceled out two sticks of Lembas Bread each. Technically one should have been enough for every eight hours, but they both felt they deserved to chew on something for more than several seconds.

“Thank you.” Peter broke the silence. “For earlier. That was—that helped a lot.”

“It’s nothing.”

“You know, I really thought I was going to die.” He shook his head. “Dear God. I’ve never felt so sure I was going to die.”

“I wouldn’t have let you die,” Alice said blithely.

The words just rolled off her tongue, since they seemed so obviously the right things to say.

Though the moment she heard them out loud, they felt off.

Those were easy utterances between loved ones, even between friends—between any two people friendlier than whatever Alice and Peter were right now.

There was an implicature of trust. But the problem was, bluntly, that she didn’t know if it was true.

She suspected Peter didn’t know either. “Professor Grimes would be very disappointed, for one thing.”

“Well. Can’t disappoint Professor Grimes.”

For a moment they chewed and swallowed in silence.

Lembas Bread had a terrible way of sticking in your mouth.

It got up in your gums and under your tongue and made you feel for hours like you’d dragged your open mouth through a sand bank.

The only way to get it all out was to swish with liquor, for Lembas Bread dissolved in alcohol, but they had none.

Alice wished she could dig a pinkie around her molars—but alas, not in front of Peter.

To some fool part of her brain it still mattered that she didn’t look childish in front of Peter.

“It’s strange, you know.” Peter tilted his head back, eyes half-lidded. “Hearing you talk about him.”

“Who, the professor?”

It was always Professor Grimes with them.

The full word and surname. Not “Grimes,” not even “Prof Grimes.” Most faculty encouraged their graduate students to address them by their first names—they were colleagues now, their relationship was different, more equal—but Professor Grimes would have recoiled in disgust if they were ever to try calling him Jacob.

“Yeah,” said Peter. “I thought you didn’t like him all that much.”

Alice prickled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I—well, nothing in particular. I just thought—I don’t know, you always seemed a bit on edge around him. Recently, I mean.”

“He’s the greatest magician alive. You’d be stupid not to be on edge.”

Peter considered this, then nodded. “I didn’t mean to imply that your—your relationship was bad. I just thought you weren’t too fond of each other. I mean—just in the last term—I suppose it wasn’t hard to notice...” He trailed off.

Alice blinked down at her hands.

Yes, things had been decidedly chilly between her and Professor Grimes in the weeks leading up to his death.

Yes, he had yelled at her once or twice and she had yelled back and the rest of the department had probably noticed.

Had probably talked about it when she wasn’t there.

The thought of their whispers made her insides curdle with shame—and so too did Peter’s inquisitive, purportedly concerned face.

“Any private issues aside,” she said flatly, “Professor Grimes is my best shot at getting a job.”

“No, of course,” Peter said quickly. “I mean, same here.”

“Oh, please.”

“What’s that mean?”

“You’re Peter Murdoch! Aren’t they falling over themselves to hire you?”

Peter hesitated. His mouth opened slightly. Something, clearly, was on the tip of his tongue—but he wouldn’t say it, at least not to her.

Alice almost asked him what he’d meant earlier, when he said Professor Grimes was his last chance at this profession.

She wished she knew what had happened. Every department in the field had a raging boner for Peter Murdoch.

It was open knowledge that second-rate departments had been sniffing around trying to extend an early hire offer ever since he passed his qualifying exams. But she couldn’t think of a way to ask this that wasn’t nosy, or downright rude.

Perhaps once she might have. But that intimacy had long disappeared. And if she pressed, she knew, he would only vanish.

“Well,” he said at last, “I suppose I would have found a new advisor after the Cooke.”

Alice’s heart stuttered. “You won the Cooke?”

“I only found out last week,” he said. “They were delayed in their admissions cycle this year on account of—well, you know. The accident.”

Alice found it a bit difficult to breathe just then.

Her cheeks burned, and her head felt uncomfortably light.

She’d hoped, as an undergraduate, that this intense physiological reaction to jealousy might eventually go away, but as she progressed through graduate school it only grew worse.

Every published paper, every conference invitation, elicited a panicked, fight-or-flight response, one that she’d never gotten good at concealing.

So it wasn’t her after all; so she’d been wrong to hope.

“Congratulations,” she said, ever so lightly, so her voice wouldn’t break. “That’s marvelous.”

“Thank you,” said Peter. “I really wasn’t sure I’d get it, but I suppose they liked my proposal after all.”

“Of course they liked it,” she said flatly.

“Sorry, I wasn’t trying to brag.”

“Of course not.”

“I just—it all happened very quickly, so I’m still wrapping my head around it.

” Peter cleared his throat. “Sorry, that was tactless. I suppose—I guess, if you didn’t get it—I mean, I guess they just didn’t want a linguist this year.

Er—I mean, not as a slight against linguists. But you know what I mean.”

Oh, fuck you , thought Alice.

The previous year she had applied for, and expected to win, the prestigious Cooke Fellowship for dissertation research.

The Cooke Fellowships, founded a century ago by a widow of one of the founding theoreticians of English magick, were incredibly prestigious.

They offered not only ample funding for summer travel to anywhere in the world, but also a procession of dinners and cocktail parties before and after with the Cooke family descendants.

The descendants were invariably insufferable, but the parties were well attended because no one liked to say no to free food, and so this let you rub elbows with the academic elite for weeks on end.

Cooke Fellows could only be nominated by senior members of the Royal Academy of Magick, whose ranks included Professor Grimes.

“You’ll get the Cooke,” he had assured her, all those months ago.

“Oh, they’ll love you. You’ll be the best candidate they’ve seen in years.

They’ve been dying to nominate a woman—you’re a shoo-in.

” And since back then Alice still believed every word out of his mouth, she spent days after that conversation delirious with glee.

But then some months passed, and Professor Grimes had started changing the subject every time she brought it up.

She tried to do it with subtlety. She would mention another research opportunity and follow it up with, “Though I suppose it’ll conflict with the Cooke.

” But all he ever gave her was evasive nods and murmurs.

“We’ll see,” he said. “It’s always a coin toss.

” And then, later on, “You know, the Cooke’s very competitive.

” And later than that, “I heard they’re not overfond of linguists. ”