Page 129 of Katabasis
Alice dragged herself over to the cat and set about dismembering it.
You could do quite a lot with bones, it turned out. Alice extracted all the spiky bits—claws, vertebrae, the end of its tail—and gathered them in a handkerchief. She reasoned she could clutch them in her knuckles and, in a pinch, gouge at cheeks or eyes. The cat’s femurs were long and hard. She bashed them against a rock and found herself with a set of makeshift daggers. Delighted, she weighed them in her hands. They were lighter than her knives and better fit her grip.
Now for armor. It took some finagling, but at last she managed to extract the cat’s rib cage intact and slide it on over her own torso. It was surprisingly light. She tapped it a few times with her knife, and the bones felt sturdy enough. It wouldn’t stop a blade piercing her heart, but it would ward off glancing blows.
“Ooh,” said Gradus. “Terrifying.”
Alice preened.
The only item she couldn’t use was the skull. She spent nearly an hour digging the eyes and brains out with her fingers, though once she’d cleaned off the skull she couldn’t pry it unhinged or fit it in a way that made sense as a helmet. Her head simply wouldn’t fit. Pity, she thought; it looked very cool.
Instead she made a little mound with the dirt, arranged some pebbles in a neat circle, and placed the skull on top. She even inscribed a bit of magick to keep the mound intact. Just a tiny ward that stilled change. It wouldn’t keep someone from kicking it over, but it would protect against the little erosions of time. Wind blowing, rodents scurrying.
She sat back, satisfied.There, she thought. She’d made her own contribution to the map of madness. Years might pass and the cat’s skull might still be here, those massive sockets leering at all those who passed. Let it bedevil the next sojourner who came through, demanding interpretation. She bowed low to the little shrine, since she felt the cat deserved some of her gratitude, and then tapped it on the forehead. “Remember me, won’t you? Even if they gut me like a pig.”
“You don’t have to fight them,” said Gradus.
“What’s that?”
His voice was hardly a mumble. “You have a head start. You could hide out in Dis.”
“Oh, Gradus.” She smiled. “Are you trying to get me to run?”
Gradus would not meet her eye. His face was faded halfway into mist, and the miasma around his legs curled in and darkened, as if he were hiding within himself. Alice found this adorable. “Your odds are terrible.”
“I know.”
“The Kripkes are practiced killers. You are a mouse. They will drain your blood and kick your bones into the Lethe.” Gradus paused. “I do not wish that for you.”
Alice knew better than to imagine he cared. Probably he regarded her the way one regarded a toy kitten. Oh, please don’t run into the street. We still have games to play. Still, this was the first time in a while that anyone had expressed concern over her demise, and she was dearly touched.
“I wish I could give you a hundred years of memories, John Gradus.” She made a gesture toward the mist. He shrank away; shy, or startled, or both. “But that would take no sand out of the hourglass. We’d only be delaying the inevitable.”
He sounded peevish. “But at least you’d still be here.”
“If I die, I die,” said Alice. “But there’s no life otherwise, I think. Life is an activity that’s got to be sustained. You have to fight for it. Otherwise it’s no life at all. That’s just it. It’s just an impulse. And we’ve both determined that’s not enough. You know that.”
Gradus hovered silent for a while. Then he said, “Snort some chalk.”
“What?”
“It will help. Just trust me.”
“I’m not going to snort chalk!”
It was a long-running joke at Cambridge that snorting chalk imbued you with all the magical potential energy of long-dead sea creatures. But magick chalk was also an academy-restricted substance shown to deteriorate human tissue upon ingestion, and improper use could get you a lifetime ban from practicing magick, so despite all the jokes at the pub, no one had ever tried it.
“I am not joking,” Gradus said. “Snort the chalk.”
Alice pressed the nib of a stick to the back cover of her notebook. It broke off into chunks. Too bad, she thought. She’d always prized Barkles’ inability to crumble.
“Where I’m from they cut it with a penknife,” said Gradus.
Alice was trying to crush it with the base of her palm, but all that did was leave dents in her flesh. “Stop mocking me.”
“Just try it.”
Alice had lost the penknife, so she tried the dagger instead. It took a bit of experimenting but she did manage by alternating the dull and sharp sides to cut the chalk into pieces that wouldn’t choke her. When it seemed sufficiently pulverized, she gathered it into a neat little pile in her palm. Then she leaned over and huffed.
