Page 93 of Katabasis

But, Alice reminded herself, she had been through quite a lot in this past week.

She had faced down the ends of time; had escaped from the Rebel Citadel; had vanquished the Kripkes; had ripped a cat open with her bare hands and eaten its heart and made its skull a shrine in the deserts of Dis.

These sorts of experiences were very transformative.

They gave her a bit more clarity on—well, everything.

“You know Peter’s dead.”

“One assumes. He came down, and here he’s not.”

“But don’t you care?”

“It’s tragic, obviously.” Professor Grimes waved a hand. “But let’s look forward. It’s opened up possibilities.”

He said something else, but Alice did not hear.

Something clicked shut in her then. It was the strangest feeling. Indeed it made her a little giddy. She had never before exercised the ability to simply drown him out.

Coolly she looked him up and down.

She’d never looked upon Professor Grimes so frankly.

She’d always felt like she was looking into the sun, somewhat; she felt that she couldn’t look him directly in the face, or she’d burn away.

But she had witnessed divinity now. The mundane did not compare.

Now, in the afterlife, she saw him more clearly than ever; in part because she was no longer so scared of looking, and in part because she saw only what he chose to show.

Just an ordinary man, puffing himself up, darting around for any way out of his predicament.

Cruel, callous—and so, so full of unjustified assumptions.

Truly, he had put so little effort into keeping himself together.

All fierce expression and no substance. He was less a menacing shroud than unformed brushstrokes of gray.

Even the newly dead Shades she’d encountered in Asphodel had better definition than that.

Professor Grimes was not good at being dead, did not have the fortitude of mind, hadn’t come close to conquering Hell, and Alice found this deeply disappointing.

It was all so unfair, she thought. You thought people were giants, and they devastated you by being so human.

This was the saddest thing. The loss of faith. If he really were a giant, she would have followed him still.

“Was that all?” she asked.

“Pardon?”

“Was that everything you wanted to say?”

He faltered. “Well, Alice—”

“May I speak, then?”

She clutched the Dialetheia tight with one arm. With the other, she reached around and dug her notebook out of her rucksack. She flipped several pages, then spun the notebook around and held it up before Professor Grimes. “You know what this does, surely.”

He bent over to read. “Erichtho?” He frowned. “What is this? Did you summon spirits from below to help you?”

“No,” said Alice. “It’s what I would have done to you. I only mean to show you my work.”

She tossed the notebook to the ground. She knew he could decipher her work at a glance. He had probably worked through something very similar already.

“I would have anchored your soul back to your body. I would have stitched your throat back to your lungs and suspended the muscles around them from electromagnetic wires. I would have tethered you as a talking head inside a wooden frame and not let you go, no matter how much you screamed, until I got everything I needed out of you.”

His smile faltered. She saw it falter—only for a moment, but this gave her an absurd burst of pride, the fact that after everything, she had managed to shock him after all.

“So.” She swallowed. “There.”

Professor Grimes loomed over the sheets, reading in silence.

She was so familiar with this silence. She had sat so many times in his office, fingers twisting nervously in her lap while he read through pages of her work.

She knew he liked to let the silence linger.

It was an intimidation tactic. He’d told her as much, he did it all the time to journalists, to colleagues he disliked.

Once his silence had terrified her. Now she felt a fierce, hot pleasure, knowing he was silent only because he was scrambling for a way to respond.

At last he said, “That won’t possibly work.”

“It does,” she assured him. “It’s how I vanquished Nick Kripke.”

How dare he, she thought. Making impingements, implying failure, when he had no grounds to do so except for being a dick.

The Erichtho spell was some of the best work she’d ever done.

Cracking the portal to Hell, uncovering Erichtho’s footsteps, making sense of the rotted archives, all of it.

Truly this was top-notch scholarship. When Alice really thought about it, this was the worst thing that Professor Grimes had ever done to her—made her doubt she was a good scholar.

He’d destroyed her faith in her own ability to think, and to judge the results of her thought, instead of turning to him at every step for confirmation.

And it was just so unfortunate that it took his death for her to conceive, research, and carry out an entire project on her own.

“I can’t believe you thought it wouldn’t work,” she said. “I mean—you absolute clown—how would you even know ?”

He’d lost her. He knew it. “Now look, Law—”

She dropped to her knees and smoothed her fingers across the ground. The sand here felt different from the sand in the Eight Courts; different even from the islands’ shores. Grittier, the grains larger, more like the grains in the world above. Not nearly so silky, dreamlike, smooth.

“Don’t.” A note of fear crept into Professor Grimes’s voice. “Alice. Let’s not be so drastic.”

“I won’t,” said Alice. “I thought I wanted that, once. It’s all I dreamed about. But now I think—I’d just like an exchange.”

She drew a little stick from her pocket.

It was Elspeth’s chalk—Alice’s last stick had turned to a useless clump in the Lethe.

Shropley’s Standard, alas, but Peter had also preferred Shropley’s, and since this work was all his, Alice figured she stood a better chance.

Magicians had theories about that. The best chalk for a spell was the chalk the originator used.

A superstition, probably, but still this made her feel safe; made Peter’s memory more vivid.

She traced a little line against the sand and held her breath, watching, waiting.

The line remained. The sands did not eat her chalk.

Alice glanced at King Yama. She thought she saw the slightest nod of his head.

She drew a large arc then, covering as much ground as she could.

“What’s that?” Professor Grimes hovered over Alice’s shoulder. “What are you doing?”

“You won’t have seen this work,” said Alice. “He wouldn’t have shown you. Not after that set theory paper—I mean really, how low can you go?”

“Stop this.”

“Move a bit that way, would you? I need some more space.”

“Alice Law—I command you, stop this at once .”

She ignored him. She had to focus. She had so little chalk left; just a tiny nub, not nearly enough for redos. She had to get this right, and if she didn’t—she couldn’t let herself imagine what would happen if she didn’t.

It was so hard to remember. She’d forgotten so much.

She couldn’t rely on that automatic facility anymore—what she’d gained in healing, she’d given up in skill.

She’d grown reliant on picture-perfect captures appearing in her mind’s eye; until this point, all her work had been mere tracing.

How much harder it was to reach for memories she wasn’t sure were there.

Blurred now were the lines between memory and imagination.

She could not trust her mind not to invent what she wished she’d seen.

The best thing she could do was to try to turn off that part of her brain that thought too much.

Sink into the movement of the chalk, and let the memory of Peter guide her work.

“That’s not a valid pentagram,” said Professor Grimes.

“Hush,” she said.

“Those algorithms aren’t in conversation. You’re just making things up.”

“Like you would know.”

He slapped her across the face. He tried, anyhow. His hand passed clean through her head, and Alice felt nothing more than the tiniest waft of air. She glanced up at him, unimpressed. “Seems bodies are good for some things.”

He swiped again; a batty, pointless movement. He growled, glaring at his hand, but glare as he might he could not make the smoke materialize into a solid.

“You’ve got to have fantastic proprioception,” Alice informed him. “That’s when you know where all parts of your body are without looking. It takes years of practice, but then you can become anything. Elspeth was very good at that. She could even become butterflies.”

Professor Grimes was starting to realize his defeat.

He floated back, and his essence condensed around his form; a form that was not so tall as Alice had remembered.

Indeed, she’d never noticed how he’d started to develop a hunch, how his shoulders were not so broad, his demeanor not so intimidating as she’d thought.

“Alice, please. Let’s talk about this.”

“Please, Professor. I’m working.”

“ Bah. ” He drifted to the circle’s edge. Alice glanced up sharply. She had not considered this—she needed him inside the pentagram. But Professor Grimes seemed unable to leave. He ran up against the edge of the pentagram, but something invisible kept him from going further.

“What is this?” Professor Grimes whirled on King Yama. “Let me out.”

“You were summoned for an audience,” said King Yama. “Alice Law, are you finished with your audience?”

“No,” said Alice.

“Then it would be impolite to leave.”

“You can’t do this,” said Professor Grimes. “You’re supposed to be impartial, you can’t just—arbitrarily—it’s against the rules.”

“Haven’t you learned, Jacob Grimes?” King Yama’s smile looked demonic beneath his furrowed brows. “Hell has no rules.”

Professor Grimes wilted then. Finally, he had nothing to say.

Alice was fascinated by this. She had never seen Professor Grimes look desperate.

For that matter she’d never seen him need anything.

She wondered then if he might beg—but then, Professor Grimes didn’t know how to beg.

He had spent so much of his life in a position of power; he was used to granting mercies, not receiving them, and it had been so long since anyone told him no.

This much was obvious, for his desperation quickly turned to indignant fury.

“I made you,” he told her. “I molded you from inchoate dream. I gave shape to your clay. I lit your fire and gave you a mind. I made you. ”

“Be that as it may.” Alice did not care to contest this. “You should be kinder to your creations.”

“Alice Law—”

“Shush.”

Alice drew the circle closed and began to chant.

Oh, he howled then. He screamed at her all the invectives that could possibly apply, something about whores and tarts and stupid, stupid brats.

She didn’t make out the specifics; she let it all fade into a vicious homogenous wash.

She’d heard it all before. He leaned over her, came so close that his aura was superimposed over hers, as if he could settle into her body by sheer force of will.

He leaned round and screamed into her ear.

He forced his ghostly head into hers and screamed into her mind.

You are a child you are useless you are stupid—

Alice however was very good at incantations.

Indeed, she could thank Professor Grimes for that.

Concentration was so important for magicians, and he had spent much of her first year pacing around her in a circle, barking distractions while she knelt and flinched and scrawled with shaky hands.

You’ll never succeed unless you can draw a perfect, steady circle in a hurricane, he told her.

Make your mind an iron house. Make the mundane disappear.

Everything is irrelevant but the circle.

Everything fades into the back, until you are standing alone on a plane with the idea—and then the work begins.

So now Alice found it astonishingly easy to just close her eyes, pretend he wasn’t there, and finish what she was saying.

A wind whipped up within the pentagram. Only a mild breeze at first, but it quickly grew stronger and stronger until Alice’s hair blew all around her face, and she could not hear anything but the roar.

Professor Grimes jerked up as if yanked by a hook.

He flipped upside down, arms flailing, and when he revolved to meet her gaze his face was slack and helpless.

He might have shouted something, but the wind drowned him out.

They had been here before. This too was a repetition, this violent disintegration.

She was watching now a mere replay of that first death.

But this time Alice knew what she had done, and how this would end.

This time she did not cower, but watched unflinching.

Professor Grimes spun slowly, and with each revolution his essence spiraled away like smoke from a fire, disappearing somewhere Alice could not know.

At last he was just a miserable howling head, then a bag of a face, and that too peeled away, until the pentagram was empty. The wind died. Silence fell.

The air cleaved apart, cut through by the outline of a door. A crack had opened in the world. The door swung open, and Peter Murdoch stumbled out.