Page 107 of Katabasis
I did not mean to do what I did, stated the author, and then went on to describe his violent crime. There Alice saw quite a lot of passive constructions.My heart was seized with rage. My hand was possessed of a knife.
She let the page drift away and plucked another out of the air. This one was written in a different handwriting, and seemed preoccupied with the many reasons why women, in fact, enjoyed being raped. She plucked yet another page. Murder of the elderly is a social necessity, it argued. They are a drain on resources and annoying besides.
Not the work of a single madman, then. For whatever reason Lower Hell was full of authors justifying their sins, and from the looks of it, producing many failed drafts. Alice wondered who this was written for, and who was reading, and which divine reader was deeming these dissertations unworthy of a pass. What would that reader make of her excuses? What excuses could she possibly make?
She continued on until the sunfell again, and then she sat down and made her little camp. She nibbled a bit of Lembas Bread. She had left only one morsel the length of her index finger, which made eight pinches she could spread over eight days. She chugged from the Perpetual Flask until her stomach hurt, which was the second-best thing to being full. No matter how much she drank, however, her tongue still felt like sandpaper. Yet the rest of her felt deliciously light, a feeling she remembered well from lab days; the days she hadn’t eaten, and was deliberately not eating anymore, just to push the boundaries of how little she needed it. She knew not to trust that lightness. It was always the prelude to the crash.
She wished she could find any sort of shelter. The tower was long behind her, and all that lay before her was open terrain. There were not even boulders against which she might curl. The best she could do was throw her jacket over her head and take refuge in an ostrich’s logic—maybe if she couldn’t see them, they couldn’t see her. She pulled her legs beneath her and wrapped her hands around her head.
Something snuffled against her side. She cracked her eyes open.
Archimedes was carefully arranging himself in a ball inside her shadow. His fur was scarred and matted; a trickle of dried blood had hardened against his face. Alice blinked several times, hoping she had not hallucinated his presence; but every time she looked, the cat was still there. She reached with a palm to stroke his side, though stopped when the cat flinched from her touch.
“Did they get you too?”
Archimedes mewed. His right eye seemed unable to open. His left met her gaze, a hard green glint.
“Looks like you gave them hell, though.”
Archimedes sniffed.
“Made out better than we did, anyway.” She tried again to stroke him, though this time she made sure first he knew where her hand was. This time he let her, pressing the top of his head into her palm. “Good for you.”
She pulled herself to a sitting position and fished some Lembas Bread from the rucksack. The cat watched, unmoving, as she arranged it on a bit of wrapping before him. “Go on,” she said.
He stretched his head forth to nibble.
“I thought cats were obligate carnivores,” said Alice.
Archimedes wriggled his bum, which seemed to be cat-speak forI do what I want.
“What’s happened?” Alice asked. “Where’s Elspeth?”
Archimedes did not answer.
“Maybe we can look out for one another,” said Alice. “Keep watch, and all that.”
Archimedes made no indication he’d heard her.
“Please stay,” said Alice. “I don’t—I can’t make it all alone.”
Archimedes stretched forward and rested his head between his front legs. His rump settled unhelpfully atop the hilt of her knife. Then his right eye closed.
How stupid, Alice thought,pleading for help from a cat.
But it was still a comfort, watching that matted, blood-streaked flank rise and fall. Archimedes made a little wheezing noise every time he breathed in. The whole of his little rib cage trembled with the effort, but this did not disturb his slumber. He did not seem in any hurry to abandon her. Alice supposed life did survive down here after all; kicking and biting and snarling its way through. The indomitable will to live. She lay down next to the cat, curling her own torso around him like a fortress, and wondered where she might find that in herself.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Alice slept. She dreamed, and lost herself in the specificity of memory: a spoon clinking against a teacup, driblets spilling out the sides that deepened to blood-red; the teacup became a bladder pouch, and the spoon a knife of bone. Helen Murray’s voice; white teeth, lipstick too bright, smeared over dry skin. What do you want, Alice? Did you think you were the first? Alice in a graveyard, dirt beneath her nails; a shovel in her hands, an ache in her back. Professor Grimes, or at least the pieces she’d found of him; an eye, a lip, a fragment of a nose; all the little pieces on a sheet of wax paper, lined up against a poor pencil sketch; and a nail through his forehead, just to keep it all in place; all the scribbled recordings of the Thessalian witch. The living face imposed over the revived pieces. Those shredded lips moved. Good morning, he said.
Alice awoke.
A Shade knelt over her; all silvery smoke, his face very close to her own. She jolted upright.
They regarded each other. The Shade had such a slippery face, features lapsing and shifting, as if he couldn’t decide himself what he looked like. If Alice had been pressed to describe him, the best analogy she could have come up with was a grayscale mugshot. Nondescript, fugitive. He looked at her with what Alice could only think of as a wide-eyed hunger, not destructive, but longing, as if he wanted to take her in with all of his senses. The look of her, the smell of her.
Still—and this was her foggy, starved head thinking—he didn’tseemdangerous. At least he was not warped with that singular meanness of the Shades in Greed, or the suffocating howl of Wrath. He seemed more human than any of them, more in control of his appetites anyhow. If this Shade was going to hurt her, she supposed he would have done it while she was asleep, and for this reason she sat still where she was.
