Page 11 of Katabasis
“Postwar boom’s over, everywhere’s developed, and all the girls are taking pills—”
“Oh, isthatit?”
“My word.” Peter stood on the tips of his toes, trying to see over the crowd. “It’s worse than Fifth on a Friday.”
“You’ve been to Fifth?” Alice asked.
“I tried. Never got in.”
Alice did feel as if she were stuck outside a nightclub, only the doors were out of sight, and no one was enforcing the queue. “Do you think he’s still here?”
Perspective was not reliable here. It was impossible to tell how quickly the queue was moving, or how much distance separated them from the wall. Professor Grimes might have passed through days ago. He might have been stuck in line, several yards away. Alice wished she had consulted some material about birth and death rates. How many people in the world had died over the past two months? How many had reincarnated since? She did not recall any archival information about queuing to depart Asphodel—Orpheus and all the rest seemed to just walk right into the courts—but then all the sojourner accounts were from a period when the world was smaller, when a more manageable number of souls came and went. Possibly this wall was a recent development. A sort of postwar chthonic immigration control.
“We could shout for him,” said Peter.
“Oh, let’s not do that.” Alice had seen no sign of guardian deities yet, but she knew as a general rule it was best when sojourners did not draw attention to themselves. She sized up the queue, then squared her shoulders. “We might just try and gothrough.”
The lines looked dense, but weren’t Shades immaterial? Setiya and Penhaligon certainly thought so—Shades had only memories of their bodies, they were spirit stuff alone, and so they could not interact with the physical in any meaningful way. Alice and Peter were flesh and bone, and matter trumped empty space. So suppose she justpushed—but she wasn’t three steps in before she was swarmed by Shades. Irritation exploded around her.
“Cutting—”
“No cutting—”
“Get out—”
“Rude!”
Icy chill spread throughout her limbs. She felt a slimy pressure against her skin. So she was wrong—it seemed Shades could indeed become something resembling the material when it suited them. She recalled the more intact girl from before, how for an instant she had seemed more solid. The crowd formed a frothy irascible mass, pushing and squeezing from all sides until she could hardly breathe. The pressure sharpened. She yelped and jumped back out of line. “All right,” she said. “Jesus—no cutting, all right.”
The pressure vanished; the chill eased. The mass subsided back into the queue.
“So that’s out.” Alice rubbed her arms. “Seems like they—ow!”
A Shade had bumped past her, elbowing her so hard she nearly fell to the ground. He seemed to have invested all his corporeal memory into that elbow. Ithurt.
“Blasted magicians,” hissed the Shade. “No respect.”
The pain to her ribs was terrible, but Alice was too excited to mind. “How do you know we’re magicians?”
“Chalk all over your hands,” said the Shade. “Chalk on your kneecaps. What else are you, cokeheads?”
Here Alice began to suspect this Shade was a mathematician. Mathematicians hated magicians.
“Have you seen another magician?” Peter asked eagerly. “Here? Recently?”
“Have I seen a magician,” muttered the Shade. “Have I seen a magician, a snotty arrogant magician, striding about like he owned the place, like the rest of us don’t exist—”
That sounded just like Professor Grimes. “When?” Alice demanded.
“A day,” said the Shade. “A week. A month. Who’s counting?”
“And he’s definitely crossed over?” Peter pressed. “He’s not queuing still?”
“The rate he was going?” The Shade snorted. “Marching on like he had somewhere to be. Would be surprised if he hasn’t reached the Eighth Court by now. They would have admitted him just to get him out of here. And good riddance.”
Alice wanted to sprint up to the gates right then. But the Shades were all casting her dirty looks now, and she doubted they would part politely if she asked. What to do, then? Wait their turn? But even if they got through, Alice didn’t know what deities guarded the end of the queue, or whether they were disposed to help the living. And Professor Grimes was moving fast, with purpose. If he didn’t want to delay, then he was bent on reincarnation. They couldn’t simply stand here. It was a race against time now, and Alice didn’t know how long the courts could hold a persona like Grimes.
“Say, Law.” Peter was eyeing the wall. From a distance it had seemed a smooth marble edifice, flawless and flat, but up close Alice saw now that the wall was constructed instead of thousands of little bones, stacked up on each other in a dense, ancient mass. Accumulated detritus of millions of years of life. A mountain of preserved time. Though horizontally it was endless, vertically it was not—it appeared to stretch forty, fifty meters before it topped out to a smooth straight line. No taller than the university library.
