Page 121 of Katabasis
“And should I want to leave?”
“I will not force you to stay. No one comes to the citadel except by free will. But I think you will be much more comfortable here than you ever could have been outside.” Gently, Gertrude pressed her hand against Alice’s back. “Go on. The city is yours.”
This seemed rather abrupt to Alice. She did not know what more fanfare she could have wanted—Gertrude had delivered precisely what she had promised—but she had not expected such a quick dismissal.
“But where is everyone?”
“Resting. People come to the citadel for the quiet. We do not squabble like those down below. Wander as you like, but in time you will find you prefer the quiet as well.”
Alice felt a twinge of panic. She did not want to be all alone here; she didn’t know what to do with herself. “But where are you going?”
“To mind the city.” Gertrude gave Alice’s shoulder a firm, final press. “Go now. Find your peace.”
So Alice wandered down the marblepath, feeling a bit like a child told, before the sun was even down, to go to bed.
She spent a while peering at the statues, but their smooth perfection got boring in short order. They were only inspiring from a distance; up close, all their faces looked the same. Florence had been fascinating in a way this place was not, she thought. Florence was textured. Nothing here had history. Nothing was cracked or rubbed shiny with time. It was all built and repaired and maintained constantly so that eternity somehow looked merely a decade old.
She felt a bit let down, if she was being honest. The nameRebel Citadelpromised something more—ideally, something rebellious—but mostly it just seemed quiet. Where were the Lucifers?
She wandered further along the silent path, mildly curious to see where she would end up. She could not grasp the citadel’s design. It was not a spiral or a beehive or a simple spread on the hill, but somehow all three of those at once. It curved in on itself; the same paths that crawled down its inside also looped around its outside. Several times she passed along dark, high walls, convinced she was down deep in the city’s bowels, only to pop out unexpectedly onto a terrace. Outside, from all angles, the citadel seemed empty and idyllic—so then where were its secrets? Alice fixed herself an arbitrary principle—turn always toward the darkness—and this led her to a dense maze of squares that quite resembled the walled-in matrix of alleys and campos of Venice. She turned a corner into what looked like a courtyard, and saw in the dim light the most incredible thing.
Growth. A root. Abranch.
Alice’s heart leapt. A True Contradiction, Elspeth had named it. Something growing in the land where there can be no new life. Was this the secret to their confidence? Could the Rebel Citadel have grown its own Dialetheia?
But this branch didn’t look like how the archives said. The archives promised a dazzling bloom, a vitality that shouldn’t be. But this branch was a withered, black-brown thing, extending limply from a dried-out bush. When Alice touched it with her fingertip, it shrank away like a worm from salt.
She thought she heard a voice in the dark. But it was so faint, a feeling more than a word. Something likeNo, go away, leave me be.
“What on earth?” she murmured.
She touched the branch again. And though the branch shrank back further, Alice heard the sound more definitely this time—a coherent voice now, a word she could just barely make out, if she could decipher its language. She held her finger against the branch, and a whorl of whispers seeped through the air.
She strained her ears.Please let it be a ghost, she thought,please give me some company, anyone at all. But whenever she tried to seize on one strand, to decipher its train of thought, it dissipated back into the mass. All she could make out was a general air of hostility. The branch did not want her there. The bush wanted to be left alone. But Alice was too curious to leave things be.
She moved fast this time, and succeeded in grasping the tendrils in her palm. The whispers grew louder. She knew it was foolish, but she simply had to know, with sick fascination, what would happen if she grasped a branch and simply—
Crack.
The branch snapped in her hand. The bush shrank back, all its whispers crying out at once. They were not loud cries, but so dearly pathetic.
Why would you do that, they cried.Why would you ever do that?
Alice glanced to her palm. The branch was a branch no longer, but an ugly twisted thing. She dropped it. It shriveled and crumbled into dust, and in the bushes where she’d broken it a shiny tip was exposed to air, gleaming with something darker than blood. A whisper of smoke curled around that wound, the same gray of a Shade’s essence.
Alice ventured deeper into the campo, and saw row upon row of bushes and trees—a whole garden, interlacing thorns and twisted branches and mulch. She moaned. “All of you?”
“Not so loud!”
Alice jumped.
It was the knob at her knee that spoke; an ugly, lumpy growth in the side of a blackened tree. She could personify that stump, if she tilted her head just the right way. A rustle, a groan, and suddenly it became the turtle-like head of a toothless old man. He nipped at her fingers. Alice yanked her hand back, and the knob cackled.
“Playing. Only playing. Don’t startle, love.”
Alice folded her arms tight across her chest.
“Are you new here?” the knob inquired.
